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Internationalization of peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed book publications in the Social Sciences and Humanities

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Abstract

In this article barycenters of the places of publication of monographs, edited books and book chapters are used to represent the internationalization of research in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) as practiced at universities in Flanders (Belgium). Our findings indicate that, in terms of places of publication, the distance between peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed SSH book literature is growing. Whereas peer reviewed books are increasingly published abroad and in English, non-peer reviewed book literature remains firmly domestic and published in the Dutch language. This divergence is more the case for the Social Sciences than for the Humanities. For Law we have found a pattern along the lines of the Social Sciences. We discuss these findings in view of the two main readerships of SSH publications: international academia on the one hand, and a mostly domestic intelligentsia on the other.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Ronald Rousseau, Truyken Ossenblok and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

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Correspondence to Frederik T. Verleysen.

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Verleysen, F.T., Engels, T.C.E. Internationalization of peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed book publications in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Scientometrics 101, 1431–1444 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1267-x

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