Abstract
On the basis of bibliometric data, this chapter shows that international collaboration in the social sciences and humanities has increased strongly between 1980 and 2014, but that the pattern of exchange has known few structural changes. At the basic level of production capacity and article output, the global field of the SSH is best described as a Euro-American duopoly. At the higher level of co-authorships and citations, however, the field structure tends to be monopolistic: no language can compete with English, no country can rival with the USA. Globalization effects (the extension of collaboration and exchange on a world scale) have been relatively weak, and the growth of transnational exchange has reproduced rather than undermined existing hierarchies. Due to its hegemonic position, USA journals remain largely national in their authorship and references, and researchers in the USA are less frequently involved in transnational co-authorship than their colleagues in Europe. For European researchers, transnational collaboration has become somewhat more global in scope, but most of it has remained with the USA and other English speaking countries; China is the only country that has become significantly more important. In European countries the reference pattern indicates that bi-nationalism is the predominant form of transnational exchange: citation hierarchies are dominated by a combination of national and American journals, whereas international and European journals are virtually absent. Patterns of transnational collaboration and exchange thus tend to be structured like star networks with many relations to the center, less frequent relations among semi-central countries, and infrequent or absent relations among semi-peripheral and peripheral countries.
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Notes
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Throughout this article Europe includes the 28 member states of the European Union plus Norway and Switzerland. This chapter contains an updated and slightly corrected version of bibliometric data that were analyzed in an earlier publication in French (Gingras and Heilbron 2009). In addition to the update other data were added allowing a more complete analysis.
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Journals were classified as “European” if they use that adjective in their title or sub-title. They were classified as “international” on the basis of their title, subtitle or self-representation. Since Social Networks, for example, presents itself as an “international journal” it is categorized as such.
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Heilbron, J., Gingras, Y. (2018). The Globalization of European Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities (1980–2014): A Bibliometric Study. In: Heilbron, J., Sorá, G., Boncourt, T. (eds) The Social and Human Sciences in Global Power Relations. Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73299-2_2
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