International coauthorship relations in the Social Sciences Citation Index: Is internationalization leading the Network?

What is it about?

International coauthorship relations have increasingly shaped another dynamic in the natural and life sciences during recent decades. However, much less is known about such internationalization in the social sciences. In this study, we analyze international and domestic coauthorship relations of all citable items in the DVD version of the Social Sciences Citation Index 2011 (SSCI). Network statistics indicate 4 groups of nations: (a) an Asian-Pacific one to which all Anglo-Saxon nations (including the United Kingdom and Ireland) are attributed, (b) a continental European one including also the Latin-American countries, (c) the Scandinavian nations, and (d) a community of African nations. Within the EU-28, 11 of the EU-15 states have dominant positions. In many respects, the network parameters are not so different from the Science Citation Index. In addition to these descriptive statistics, we address the question of the relative weights of the international versus domestic networks. An information-theoretical test is proposed at the level of organizational addresses within each nation; the results are mixed, but the international dimension is more important than the national one in the aggregated sets (as in the Science Citation Index). In some countries (e.g., France), however, the national distribution is leading more than the international one. Decomposition of the United States in terms of states shows a similarly mixed result; more U.S. states are domestically oriented in the SSCI and more internationally in the SCI. The international networks have grown during the last decades in addition to the national ones but not by replacing them.

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