Other research and professional projects

Development of Social Sciences and Humanities in Croatia in time span 1991 - 2012

About project

Project basics

  • Duration: January 2014 - June 2016

Project description

Social sciences and humanities (SSH) in Croatia represent approximately one third of whole Croatian scientific and research potentials, as measured by the number of scientists and research institutions. Our knowledge about the scholarly communication, research performance and the role of social sciences and humanities in society, not only in Croatia, but also on international level, is inadequate in comparison to natural science, biomedicine, technology (STM). In order to investigate some of the aspects of the social sciences and humanities in Croatia, we propose a project which will continue a broad longitudinal scientometric study of this area of scientific endeavour. New indicators in this project will incorporate impact of research performance measured by citation analysis through diverse citation databases (WoS, Scopus, and Google Scholar). By introducing social network analysis (SNA) as a methodological instrument we expect to describe the paradigms of the development of scholarly communication in mentioned fields. It is a well-accepted fact that the journal is a key communication media in science. In this project we will analyse their role as an indicator of dynamics of the fields in social sciences and humanities.
The main source of data for the research will be four official databases (Ministry of Science, Education and Sports) containing relevant data about national scientific projects in the period of 1991-2013. Special algorithms for data extraction and their management will be developed in house. We expect that the project will give the answers about some aspects of research performance in each field of social sciences and humanities. Among them are the publishing paradigm (the national journals, international journals, book/monographs and other publications), citing/cited paradigm (what kinds of publications are among the most cited, who is citing them, etc.), and the changes in mentioned parameters through the period 1991-2013. Social network analysis (SNA) will show the structure of scholarly cooperation in each scientific field of the social sciences and humanities as measured via co-authorship: who are the main (most connected) scientists, main (most connected) institution in the field, network configuration (main component and other clusters), what kind of network is dominating (small world, scale-free network, etc.), dynamics of the network growth, etc.
The aspects of outcomes of the project are twofold, theoretical and pragmatic. Theoretical aspects could serve for better understanding the dynamics and development of social sciences and humanities, and their specificities. Pragmatic aspect could be visible through results and their interoperation, and could serve for the purpose of national science policy. The results could serve for the proper evaluation of scientific performance in those scientific fields, for proper investment strategies and for better reception in society.

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