Publication and Citation Patterns in the Social Sciences and Humanities: A National Perspective

From the perspective of non-Anglophone countries, accountability, liability, and capacity of scientific research is often related to the process of internationalization. The article explores the effects of this process on the example of publication and citation patterns of Serbian scholars. Results of the analysis are mostly in line with the common conceptions about the differences among scientific disciplines. Authors in social sciences and humanities have manifested more nationally oriented publication and citation behavior, tendency to cite older literature, and stronger preference towards non-journal literature. However, huge individual differences among scholars and some inconsistencies between their publication and citation patterns, reveal a form of latent conflict between the accustomed publishing behavior in social sciences and humanities and the new dynamics of knowledge production. This conflict obscures the notion of typical or expected behavior of scholars in certain disciplines and has important implications for research evaluation. Scholars in social sciences and humanities were not so eager and successful in shifting their communication to the international arena. For them, national journals still play a crucial role in the “local” information exchange. But the question is how one transitional country that is facing serious structural challenges and weak economy can afford to support “locally relevant” research projects and whether national journals have become a mere tool for an ungainly customized research evaluation in the social sciences and humanities.