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Productivity and its impact in the ISI and Scopus citation databases from 1996 to 2005

Bibliometric research of the productivity of all doctors of natural and social sciences is presented in this paper. Due to selectiveness, and particularly due to the orientation towards scientific periodicals and the English language, scientific output indexed in WoS and Scopus databases favours hard science publications, and consequently manifests even greater differences among the observed domains. To be more precise, the natural sciences greatly surpass the social sciences in terms of productivity, citation rate and the h-index. According to WoS, the average number of papers per natural scientist was ten times the number of papers per social scientist. Practically three quarters of the social scientists did not publish a single paper referenced in these databases over a period of ten years, compared to slightly over one tenth of the natural scientists. The average citation rate of a natural science paper was almost three times the citation rate per paper from the social sciences. In contrast to the social sciences that still lag behind the world average for its area, the natural sciences in general are less far behind, while some of the disciplines are on a par with their international counterparts. The defects in the international bibliometric and citation databases and the mentioned differences in patterns of scientific communication strongly suggest that the bibliometric monitoring of publications in the social sciences and humanities should not rest on the same methodological assumptions that apply to the hard sciences (Nederhof, 2006). In addition, significant disciplinary oscillations were determined in the natural and social sciences. Scientific fields show specific publication practices, making the levelling of criteria in any of the two observed scientific areas utterly questionable.

productivity, ISI citation databases, Scopus citation database, visibility (citation rate), h-index, natural sciences, social sciences, scientific fields

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