Publication patterns in the social sciences and humanities in Flanders and Poland

The authors would like to thank Ewa A. Rozkosz for her useful suggestions and remarks.This paper investigates internationalization patterns in the language and type of social sciences and humanities publications in non-English speaking countries. This research aims to demonstrate that such patterns are related not only to discipline but also to each country’s cultural and historic heritage. We used data from Flemish and Polish databases collected between 2009 and 2014. In Flanders, on the one hand, we found that changes in the use of languages and publication types were moderate and occurred gradually over several years. In Poland, on the other hand, we found significant shifts in the use of certain publication types, sometimes from year to year. Examining the social sciences and humanities literature both as a whole and broken down by discipline, we observed similar variability over time in the proportion of work published in English and in article form. However, we found remarkable differences between Flanders and Poland regarding the most commonly used languages and publication types. Overall, we found few similarities between Flemish and Polish social sciences and humanities publication patterns.The work of EK was supported by the National Programme for the Development of Humanities in Poland [grant number 0057/NPHR3/H11/82/2014]. The authors are indebted to COST Action CA1537 “European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities” for supporting this work

Predatory open access journals in a performance-based funding model: common journals in Bealls list and in the VABB-SHW

This report gives the results of the comparison of Beall’s list of predatory open access journals with the VABB-SHW lists of journals – including all journals that are being or have been indexed in the Web of Science – as of July 2013. The report may facilitate the GP’s decision making. More generally, the report may raise awareness on the prevalence of predatory open access publishing in the social sciences and humanities in Flanders. The number of articles in predatory open access journals submitted to ECOOM-UAntwerpen by the universities in view of inclusion in the VABB-SHW is increasing in recent years. Whereas no publications in predatory open access journals appeared in 2000-2002, the yearly number remained below 5 in the period 2003-2009. In 2010 the number rose to 5, and then jumped to 15 in 2011 and 24 in 2012. This illustrates that in Flanders too predatory open access publishing is gaining ground. Nonetheless, the percentage of publications in predatory open access journals remains very small thus far (0.20%, the largest proportion for any year thus far, in 2012)

Predatory open access journals in a performance-based funding model: common journals in Bealls list and in the VABB-SHW

This report gives the results of the comparison of Beall’s list of predatory open access journals with the VABB-SHW lists of journals – including all journals that are being or have been indexed in the Web of Science – as of July 2013. The report may facilitate the GP’s decision making. More generally, the report may raise awareness on the prevalence of predatory open access publishing in the social sciences and humanities in Flanders. The number of articles in predatory open access journals submitted to ECOOM-UAntwerpen by the universities in view of inclusion in the VABB-SHW is increasing in recent years. Whereas no publications in predatory open access journals appeared in 2000-2002, the yearly number remained below 5 in the period 2003-2009. In 2010 the number rose to 5, and then jumped to 15 in 2011 and 24 in 2012. This illustrates that in Flanders too predatory open access publishing is gaining ground. Nonetheless, the percentage of publications in predatory open access journals remains very small thus far (0.20%, the largest proportion for any year thus far, in 2012)

Measuring cognitive distance between publication portfolios

We study the problem of determining the cognitive distance between the publication portfolios of two units. In this article we provide a systematic overview of five different methods (a benchmark Euclidean distance approach, distance between barycenters in two and in three dimensions, distance between similarity-adapted publication vectors, and weighted cosine similarity) to determine cognitive distances using publication records. We present a theoretical comparison as well as a small empirical case study. Results of this case study are not conclusive, but we have, mainly on logical grounds, a small preference for the method based on similarity-adapted publication vectors

Predatory open access journals in a performance-based funding model: A comparison of journals in version VI of the VABB-SHW with Beall's list and DOAJ

The current report presents the results of this monitoring exercise in view of VABB-SHW version VI, which will contain publications from the time period 2005–2014. This report provides a detailed comparison of (1) the journals published by publishers listed on Beall’s list of POA publishers and the journals on Beall’s list of stand-alone journals as of 5 November 2015 with (2) the VABB-SHW list of journals as submitted to the GP in July 2015. Furthermore, we also provide details on each potentially predatory journal regarding its inclusion in Web of Science (WoS) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and we list the publishers that are, according to Beall’s list, not to be considered predatory open access anymore. This report is intended to facilitate the GP’s decision making. More generally, the report may raise awareness on the prevalence of predatory open access publishing in the social sciences and humanities in Flanders.A more relaxed approach might consist of taking the whitelisting of a journal in DOAJ as evidence of peer review and hence classify these journals as peer reviewed. However, this approach would raise the question on how the status of journals in other systems (e.g. Italian ANVUR, ERIH) will be handled

The predictive validity of peer review: A selective review of the judgmental forecasting qualities of peers, and implications for innovation in science

In this review we investigate what the available data on the predictive validity of peer review can add to our understanding of judgmental forecasting. We found that peer review attests to the relative success of judgmental forecasting by experts. Both manuscript and group-based peer review allow, on average, for accurate decisions to be made. However, tension exists between peer review and innovative ideas, even though the latter underlie scientific advance. This points to the danger of biases and preconceptions in judgments. We therefore formulate two proposals for enhancing the likelihood of innovative work.Advice taking Cognitive bias Decision-making Expert advice Group decision making Reliability

Consolidation of BPEL process models interacting via exception flow

Bei der Akquirierung von Unternehmen ist es notwendig eine einheitliche Ablauforganisation zu schaffen. Dies wird durch die Konsolidierung von Geschäftsprozessen der Unternehmen, welche in einer Choreographie miteinander kommunizieren, erreicht. Dabei können die Prozesse Fehlerbehandlungen enthalten, die ebenfalls mit konsolidiert werden müssen. Hierfür wird, in der vorliegenden Arbeit, die Umwandlung von synchronen und asynchronen Kommunikationsmuster in Synchronisationsaktivitäten anhand der BPEL Konstrukte Fault Handler, Termination Handler, Event Handler und Compensation Handler (FCTE-Handler) untersucht. Durch diese Umwandlung kann der Kontrollfluss in den BPEL Konstrukten sich verändern und muss korrigiert werden. Als weiterer Aspekt werden Kontrollflussbeschränkungen betrachtet. Hierzu werden die Grenzüberschreitungen von Links analysiert, die in die FCTE-Handler hinein- und aus diesen hinausgehen. Das Auftreten von Grenzverletzungen wird durch die Umstrukturierung der einzelnen FCTE-Handler gelöst

Is the expertise of evaluation panels congruent with the research interests of the research groups: A quantitative approach based on barycenters

Discipline-specific research evaluation exercises are typically carried out by panels of peers, known as expert panels. To the best of our knowledge, no methods are available to measure overlap in expertise between an expert panel and the units under evaluation. This paper explores bibliometric approaches to determine this overlap, using two research evaluations of the departments of Chemistry (2009) and Physics (2010) of the University of Antwerp as a test case. We explore the usefulness of overlay mapping on a global map of science (with Web of Science subject categories) to gauge overlap of expertise and introduce a set of methods to determine an entity’s barycenter according to its publication output. Barycenters can be calculated starting from a similarity matrix of subject categories (N dimensions) or from a visualization thereof (2 dimensions). We compare the results of the N-dimensional method with those of two 2-dimensional ones (Kamada-Kawai maps and VOS maps) and find that they yield very similar results. The distance between barycenters is used as an indicator of expertise overlap. The results reveal that there is some discrepancy between the panel’s and the groups’ publications in both the Chemistry and the Physics departments. The panels were not as diverse as the groups that were assessed. The match between the Chemistry panel and the Department was better than that between the Physics panel and the Department

Assessment of expertise overlap between an expert panel and research groups

Discipline-specific research evaluation exercises are typically carried out by committees of peers, expert panels. Currently, there are no available methods that can measure overlap in expertise between a panel and the units of assessment. This research in progress paper explores a bibliometric approach to determining the overlap of expertise, using the 2010 research evaluation of nine physics research groups of the University of Antwerp as a test case. Overlay maps were applied to visualize to what extent the groups and panel members publish in different Web of Science subject categories. There seems to be a moderate disparity between the panel’s and the groups’ expertise. The panel was not as diverse as the groups that needed to be assessed. Future research will focus on journal level overlay maps, similarity testing, and a comparison with other disciplines

Publication patterns in the social sciences and humanities: Evidence from eight European countries

The present study is an extended version of an article presented at the 16th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics, Wuhan (China), 16 - 20 October 2017). The authors are indebted to COST Action CA1537 “European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities” for supporting this work. Kasper Bruun is employed in the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science: positions and views expressed in the paper are solely on the account of the author. This study investigates patterns in the language and type of social sciences and humanities (SSH) publications in non-English speaking European countries to demonstrate that such patterns are related not only to discipline but also to each country’s cultural and historic heritage. We investigate publication patterns that occur across SSH publications of the whole of the SSH and of economics and business, law, and philosophy and theology publications in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Flanders (Belgium), Norway, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. We use data from 74,022 peer-reviewed publications from 2014 registered in at least one of the eight countries’ national databases and for 272,376 peer-reviewed publications from the period of 2011–2014 registered in at least one of the seven countries’ national databases (for all countries except Slovakia). Our findings show that publication patterns differ both between fields (e.g. patterns in law differ from those in economics and business in the same way in Flanders and Finland) and within fields (e.g. patterns in law in the Czech Republic differ from patterns in law in Finland). We observe that the publication patterns are stable and quite similar in West European and Nordic countries, whereas in Central and Eastern European countries the publication patterns demonstrate considerable changes. Nevertheless, in all countries, the share of articles and the share of publications in English is on the rise. We conclude with recommendations for science policy and highlight that internationalization policies in non-English speaking countries should consider various starting points and cultural heritages in different countries.The work of Emanuel Kulczycki was supported by the National Programme for the Development of Humanities in Poland [grant number 0057/NPHR3/H11/82/2014]. Tim Engels and Raf Guns thank the Flemish Government for its funding of the VABB through the Centre for R&D Monitoring (ECOOM)