This study investigates how different approaches to disciplinary classification represent the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in the Flemish VABB-SHW database. We compare organizational classification (based on author affiliation), channel-based cognitive classification (based on publication venues), and text-based publication-level classification (using channel titles, publication titles, and abstracts, depending on availability). The analysis shows that text-based classification generally aligns more closely with channel-based categories, confirming that the channel choice provides relevant information about publication content. At the same time, it is closer to organizational classification than channel-based categories are, suggesting that textual features capture author affiliations more directly than publishing channels do. Comparison across the three systems highlights cases of convergence and divergence, offering insights into how disciplines such as "Sociology" and "History" extend across fields, while "Law" remains more contained. Publication-level classification also clarifies the disciplinary profiles of multidisciplinary journals in the database, which in VABB-SHW show distinctive profiles with stronger emphases on SSH and health sciences. At the journal level, fewer than half of outlets with more than 50 publications have their channel-level classification fully or partially supported by more than 90

Purpose Organizations are major actors in multiple dimensions of the research landscape. Subsequently, accurate organization identification is a prerequisite for precise studies about, for example, collaboration in publication practice or project participation. Global reference databases are essential instruments in this context, but recent experience in Flanders showed that ROR (the worldwide Research Organization Registry) does not contain a sufficient set of records to code the full spectrum of organizations involved in research and innovation. This raises an important question: how can we structurally map all relevant science and technology actors in analysis and studies of different aspects of the research and innovation landscape? We elaborate how this question is being addressed in Flanders through the development of the Flemish Organization Registry (FOR).Design/methodology/approach FOR, as a local expansion of ROR, provides unique identifiers for all additional organizations that appear in author affiliation datasets or project participant files. We describe the source data, the consolidation, the addition of metadata and the relation to the international reference database.Findings We find, through a case study, that the use of FOR delivers structured, fine-grained information about a full set of organizations in multiple dimensions of science in a Flemish context.Research limitations The paper introduces FOR as a proof of concept and discusses one case study only.Practical implications FOR and similar regionally anchored infrastructures can be deployed as tools to enrich data when analyzing a national research context organization-wise.Originality The article presents a national extension of ROR as an example of a way to map all actors in a national research system.

University spin-off (USO) creation is typically associated with Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This study shifts the focus to the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). Drawing on institutional theory, we argue that SSH-based USOs constitute a peculiar object: they conform neither to prevailing modes of knowledge transfer in SSH, nor to the established, STEM-centric commercialization routines of technology transfer offices (TTOs). To explore how this particular institutional context shapes the development of SSH-based USOs, the study relies on a multiple-case study of 14 SSH-based USOs, primarily informed by interviews with SSH academic entrepreneurs and TTO staff members. The results demonstrate that SSH-based USOs face specific institutional constraints hindering their development. Most are normative and cognitive, rooted in disciplinary values and mental models that sustain distinct models of knowledge transfer—that of SSH versus a dominant STEM-based model, enacted respectively by SSH academic entrepreneurs and TTO staff members. Additional regulative constraints arise from formal procedures and resource allocation policies. Nonetheless, our findings also indicate that these constraints are not static. Drawing on the concept of institutional work, our results show that these constraints constitute instead spaces of active boundary work, where SSH academic entrepreneurs and TTO staff members change, redefine, or maintain the boundaries of university knowledge transfer. Importantly, our findings reveal that TTO staff members’ efforts to adapt established practices as they expand into SSH are fraught with internal tensions, as they contend with resource constraints and entrenched disciplinary norms privileging STEM-based models of USO creation.

Social sciences are increasingly recognized as significant for building a sustainable world since the social perspective can assist researchers in other fields in navigating public controversy and designing more responsible interaction mechanisms between the natural and social systems. However, the question arises: to what extent do natural sciences rely on social science research in their studies? Examining life science publications from seven PLoS journals, this paper attempts to characterize the volume and trajectory of citations from life sciences to social sciences. We explore three core questions: To what extent do life sciences cite social sciences? What actors in the life sciences are citing social sciences? Which actors in the social sciences are being cited? Our analysis estimates social sciences influence 15%–19% of life science publications, contributing to 1.1%–1.5% of references in 2018. Social science citers are found across peripheral and central topics of life science disciplines. Cited social science publications exhibit various levels of interdisciplinarity and achieve the greatest citation impact among peers. Citations to social sciences are prevalent in both theoretically and methodologically oriented sections. We show empirically the increasing impact of social sciences on the development of the life sciences.

In this article we analyze the performance of existing models to classify journal articles into disciplines from a predefined classification scheme (i.e., supervised learning), based on their abstract. The first part analyzes scenarios with ample labeled data, comparing the performance of the Support Vector Machine algorithm (SVM) combined with TF-IDF and with SPECTER embeddings (Cohan et al. SPECTER: Document-level representation learning using citation-informed transformers, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2004.07180 , 2020) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) models. The second part employes Generative Pre-trained Transformer model 3.5 turbo (GPT-3.5-turbo) for the zero- and few-shot learning situations. Through the use of GPT-3.5-turbo we examine how different characterizations of disciplines (such as names, descriptions, and examples) affect the model’s ability to classify articles. The data set comprises journal articles published in 2022 and indexed in the Web of Science, with subject categories aligned to a modified version of the OECD Fields of Research and Development (FoRD) classification scheme. We find that BERT models surpass the SVM + TF-IDF baseline and SVM + SPECTER in all areas. For all disciplinary areas except Humanities, we observe minimal variation among the models fine-tuned on larger datasets, and greater variability with smaller training datasets. The GPT 3.5-turbo results show significant fluctuations across disciplines, influenced by the clarity of their definition and their distinctiveness as research topics compared to other fields. Although the two approaches are not directly comparable, we conclude that the classification models show promising results in their specific scenarios, with variations across disciplines.

We explore the potential of libcitations from local research‐oriented and public library catalogues for a study of the societal and cultural impact of books authored by academics from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). The study relies on data from the bibliographic database VABB‐SHW, the Flemish public library catalogue Cultuurconnect, and the Belgian research library catalogue UniCat. We find that whereas a majority of academically authored SSH books appear in research‐oriented libraries, the holdings in public libraries are limited. However, libcitations in public libraries are indicative of societal and cultural impact, particularly for books written in the domestic language (in this case Dutch) and books that are not primarily aimed at academic peers (and are not peer‐reviewed). Additionally, we find that the books held in local libraries include different genres and dissemination types, as SSH scholars contribute to the creation of societal and cultural impact in a variety of ways. An overview of the types of books attaining high scores in public and research‐oriented libraries showcases avenues for the creation of societal impact through popularized literature.

This study contributes to the recent discussions on indicating interdisciplinarity, i.e., going beyond catch-all metrics of interdisciplinarity. We propose a contextual framework to improve the granularity and usability of the existing methodology for interdisciplinary knowledge flow (IKF) in which scientific disciplines import and export knowledge from/to other disciplines. To characterize the knowledge exchange between disciplines, we recognize three aspects of IKF under this framework, namely, broadness, intensity, and homogeneity. We show how to utilize them to uncover different forms of interdisciplinarity, especially between disciplines with the largest volume of IKF. We apply this framework in two use cases, one at the level of disciplines and one at the level of journals, to show how it can offer a more holistic and detailed viewpoint on the interdisciplinarity of scientific entities than aggregated and context-unaware indicators. We further compare our proposed framework, an indicating process, with established indicators and discuss how such information tools on interdisciplinarity can assist science policy practices such as performance-based research funding systems and panel-based peer review processes.

This dataset was created in the context of a project about libcitations or library catalogue analysis of book publications by Flemish Social Sciences and Humanities researchers. The dataset was constructed on the basis of the openly available API of the Belgian UniCat library catalogue (UniCat-Search). The library catalogue was searched in September 2021 by a matching of the catalogue against the ISBNs present in the VABB-SHW database (see Aspeslagh, Peter, Guns, Raf, & Engels, Tim C.E. (2021). VABB-SHW: Dataset of Flemish Academic Bibliography for the Social Sciences and Humanities (edition 11) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5795899).

In this paper, we study how research topics and trends have evolved in the field of the science of team science (SciTS). Over the past 12 years, the International Science of Team Science conference has been making efforts to understand and enhance the processes and outcomes of collaborative team science. We argue that the sessions and papers in academic conferences are the best way to reflect the latest research trends. Based on the panel sessions and submitted papers in conference programs during 2010–2019, this study tracks the featured topics and how they have evolved in the field. We extracted terms from the titles of the sessions and papers, and visualized the research hotspots, research topics, and how they have evolved for analysis. We found that the research hotspots are constantly changing, and the research topics present evolutionary characteristics, such as continuation, split, and fusion. Additionally, we examined the models and case studies of team science, the characteristics and dynamics of teams, the interdisciplinary research dynamics in team science, team science education and training, and how team science is measured and evaluated. These results summarize the major research trends and opportunities in the SciTS field.

This study compares citation-based and expert-based journal metrics as predictors of peer-assessed research quality based on 154,826 journal articles submitted to UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. The Finnish expert-based Julkaisufoorumi (JUFO) level ratings of journals determined by expert-panels per field produce scores that correlate more strongly with REF scores than those based on citation-based Journal Impact Factor (JIF) or Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) Quartiles. This holds true at aggregate levels of 34 Subject areas, 157 Higher Education Institutions (HEI), and 1,888 Units of Assessment (UoA). Especially non-field-normalised JIF-based scores correlate poorly with REF scores. All types of journal metrics are more aligned with expert-based REF scores at the highest aggregate level of HEIs and agree less at the lower aggregate level of UoAs and Subject areas.

This study presents knowledge diffusion analyses for researchers who have been active in the social sciences and humanities. We compare a network based on switches between the main disciplinary classifications of the documents authored throughout their careers to a discipline similarity network. We find that researchers are not exclusively switching between disciplines that are most similar cognitively. Only less than a third of the authors do not switch between disciplines. On the level of the individual researchers, we also study how the cognitive distance travelled relates to boundary crossing. The cognitive distance authors travel is approximated by calculating cosine distances between the vectors of title records for different periods of activity. Moving to new disciplines is found to be positively related to the cognitive distance an author travels throughout her career. Increased specialisation leading to different types of disciplinary boundary work is suggested as a potential explanation for this finding.

This study contributes to the recent discussions on indicating interdisciplinarity, that is, going beyond catch‐all metrics of interdisciplinarity. We propose a contextual framework to improve the granularity and usability of the existing methodology for interdisciplinary knowledge flow (IKF) in which scientific disciplines import and export knowledge from/to other disciplines. To characterize the knowledge exchange between disciplines, we recognize three aspects of IKF under this framework, namely broadness, intensity, and homogeneity. We show how to utilize them to uncover different forms of interdisciplinarity, especially between disciplines with the largest volume of IKF. We apply this framework in two use cases, one at the level of disciplines and one at the level of journals, to show how it can offer a more holistic and detailed viewpoint on the interdisciplinarity of scientific entities than aggregated and context‐unaware indicators. We further compare our proposed framework, an indicating process, with established indicators and discuss how such information tools on interdisciplinarity can assist science policy practices such as performance‐based research funding systems and panel‐based peer review processes.

This study contributes to the recent discussions on indicating interdisciplinarity, that is, going beyond catch-all metrics of interdisciplinarity. We propose a contextual framework to improve the granularity and usability of the existing methodology for interdisciplinary knowledge flow (IKF) in which scientific disciplines import and export knowledge from/to other disciplines. To characterize the knowledge exchange between disciplines, we recognize three aspects of IKF under this framework, namely broadness, intensity, and homogeneity. We show how to utilize them to uncover different forms of interdisciplinarity, especially between disciplines with the largest volume of IKF. We apply this framework in two use cases, one at the level of disciplines and one at the level of journals, to show how it can offer a more holistic and detailed viewpoint on the interdisciplinarity of scientific entities than aggregated and context-unaware indicators. We further compare our proposed framework, an indicating process, with established indicators and discuss how such information tools on interdisciplinarity can assist science policy practices such as performance-based research funding systems and panel-based peer review processes.

This paper investigates different uses of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in national journal rankings and discusses the merits of supplementing metrics with expert assessment. Our focus is national journal rankings used as evidence to support decisions about the distribution of institutional funding or career advancement. The seven countries under comparison are China, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Poland, and Turkey—and the region of Flanders in Belgium. With the exception of Italy, top-tier journals used in national rankings include those classified at the highest level, or according to tier, or points implemented. A total of 3,565 (75.8%) out of 4,701 unique top-tier journals were identified as having a JIF, with 55.7% belonging to the first Journal Impact Factor quartile. Journal rankings in China, Flanders, Poland, and Turkey classify journals with a JIF as being top-tier, but only when they are in the first quartile of the Average Journal Impact Factor Percentile. Journal rankings that result from expert assessment in Denmark, Finland, and Norway regularly classify journals as top-tier outside the first quartile, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. We conclude that experts, when tasked with metric-informed journal rankings, take into account quality dimensions that are not covered by JIFs.

This article presents an analysis of the uptake of the GPRC label (Guaranteed Peer Reviewed Content label) since its introduction in 2010 until 2019. GPRC is a label for books that have been peer reviewed introduced by the Flemish publishers association. The GPRC label allows locally published scholarly books to be included in the regional database for the Social Sciences and Humanities which is used in the Flemish performance-based research funding system. Ten years after the start of the GPRC label, this is the first systematic analysis of the uptake of the label. We use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. Our two main data sources are the Flemish regional database for the Social Sciences and Humanities, which currently includes 2,580 GPRC-labeled publications, and three interviews with experts on the GPRC label. Firstly, we study the importance of the label in the Flemish performance-based research funding system. Secondly, we analyse the label in terms of its possible effect on multilingualism and the local or international orientation of publications. Thirdly, we analyse to what extent the label has been used by the different disciplines. Lastly, we discuss the potential implications of the label for the peer review process among book publishers. We find that the GPRC label is of limited importance to the Flemish performance-based research funding system. However, we also conclude that the label has a specific use for locally oriented book publications and in particular for the discipline Law. Furthermore, by requiring publishers to adhere to a formalized peer review procedure, the label affects the peer review practices of local publishers because not all book publishers were using a formal system of peer review before the introduction of the label and even at those publishers who already practiced peer review, the label may have required the publishers to make these procedures more uniform.

Interdisciplinary research is widely recognized as necessary to tackle some of the grand challenges facing humanity. It is generally believed that interdisciplinarity is becoming increasingly prevalent among Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. However, little is known about the evolution of interdisciplinarity in the Social Sciences. Also, how interdisciplinarity and its various aspects evolve over time has seldom been closely quantified and delineated. This paper answers these questions by capturing the disciplinary diversity of the knowledge base of scientific publications in nine broad Social Sciences fields over 55 years. The analysis considers diversity as a whole and its three distinct aspects, namely variety, balance, and disparity. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions are also conducted to investigate whether such change, if any, can be found among research with similar characteristics. We find that learning widely and digging deeply have become one of the norms among researchers in Social Sciences. Fields acting as knowledge exporters or independent domains maintain a relatively stable homogeneity in their knowledge base while the knowledge base of importer disciplines evolves towards greater heterogeneity. However, the increase of interdisciplinarity is substantially smaller when controlling for several author and publication related variables.