Polish Sociology Citation Index as an example of usage of national citation indexes in scientometric analysis of social sciences

[1] See Zagadnienia Naukoznawstwa 31 (1995) (entire issue) for the published proceedings of a conference on assessment of an individual scholar, research institute and discipline [in Polish].

[2] The most popular citation indexes are those produced by the Institute of Scientific Information: Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index.

[3] For further discussion, see: B.M. Winclawska , Polish Sociology Citation Index (principles for creation and first results) , Scientometrics 35(3) (1996) 387-391 .

[4] Creating local citation indices has become increasingly popular for locally oriented disciplines in non-English speaking countries. See, for example, [5, 6, 7].

[5] F.C. Peres et al. , Brazilian Agricultural Science Citation Index - ICCCAgr: preliminary results , Quarterly Bulletin of the International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists 41(1) (1996) 67-69 .

[6] E. Kostolansky , Lokalny citatny index , Kniznice a Vedecke Informacie 29(3) (1991) 121-123 .

[7] H.M. Artus , Science indicators derived from databases: the case of social sciences , Scientometrics 37(2) (1996) 297-311 .

[8] M.B. Line , The structure of social science literature as shown by large-scale citation analysis , Social Science Information Studies 1(2) (1981) 61-87 .

[9] R.N. Broadus , A citation study for sociology , The American Sociologist 2(1) (1967) 19-20 .

[10] B. Cronin , H. Snyder and H. Atkins , Comparative citation rankings of authors in monographic and journal literature: a study of sociology , Journal of Documentation 53(3) (1997) 263-273 .

[11] A list of papers was created by searching the institutional affiliation field of their authors IN=POLAND) in the Source Index and selecting articles dealing with various aspects of sociology.

[12] A post-doctoral degree awarded after publication of a monograph. The habilitation degree establishes a scholar as a ‘seasoned’ researcher and puts the individual on a tenure track. In Polish universities, a scholar, to keep his or her academic post, is required to obtain habilitation within five years of achieving the PhD.

[13] According to the subject classification published annually in Journal Citation Reports.

[14] The names of several sociologists who currently are prolific but are still at the beginning of their research career (e.g. they have recently received their PhD degrees) were checked against SSCI. None of them was cited in Citation Index.

[15] Self-citations were excluded from the count.

[16] Polish Sociological Bulletin (an English-language publication of the Polish Sociological Association) was the only Polish sociological journal ever indexed in SSCI (for a few years in the early 1980s).

[17] Fraction numbers result from assigning fractions of individual’s output to a given institution. If an author has worked in two or more institutions during their career and was cited ten or more times between 1981 and 1995, he or she is ‘split’ between regions and institutions according to the length of employment and the citations to their works are divided respectively between these regions or institutions.

[18] See research by Barbara Stefaniak on international cooperation in science. A lecture delivered on 2 December 1996 at the Nicholas Copernicus University in Torun.

[19] For the purpose of comparison, the USA, Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Greece were chosen. As the USA is the leading country in sociological output and the best represented in SSCI, it forms a standard against which other countries can be measured. The remainder of the countries selected are European countries with high economic indicators (Germany and Italy), with economic indicators similar to Poland (Spain, Hungary, Czech Republic) or economically less developed countries (Slovak Republic and Greece). American authors were cited 214,265 times, German 3,371, Italian 1,009, Spanish 300, Hungarian 212 and Greek 53 times. Poland, with 249 citations, was placed 30th of 94 countries listed.

Analysis of the NSI On Disc showed a different number of citations received by Polish sociologists to that counted by the author of this paper. The author’s research identified 2,954 citations to works by Polish authors, while NSI listed only 249 citations. The difference may have arisen from a different definition of what constitutes ‘sociology’ or ‘a Polish sociologist’. In this research, the criteria for selection was the authors’ institutional affiliation, and all references to their works made between 1981 and 1995 (excluding self-citations) were counted. Criteria for classification used by the authors of NSI are unknown to the author of this paper.

[20] PSCI includes the names of about 1,600 source authors. From that group, a sample of 285 names was selected for the analysis and comparison with SSCI.

[21] Library Management East-West Relations: Proceedings of the Seminar held in Torun on 6-12 November 1994, edited by I.R.M. Mowat and M. Sliwinska (Nicolas Copernicus University Press, Torun, 1995).