Mapping national research profiles in social science disciplines

The paper investigates the advantages of graphical mapping of national research publication and citation profiles from scientific fields in order to provide additional information with respect to research performance. By means of multi‐dimensional scaling techniques national social science profiles from seventeen OECD countries and two periods, 1989‐1993 and 1994‐1998, are mapped, each profile represented by a vector of either publication volumes or citation values for nine social science fields. Aside from demonstrating the developments of publication volumes and citedness ranges as well as patterns, the graphical maps display clusters and similarities of national profiles over time. Combined with international rankings of averaged national impact factors (NIF) relative to the average world impact of field (WIF) for the same number of fields and periods, the graphical display supplies additional otherwise concealed information of the differences in research patterns between countries – even when the NIFs are quite similar. The analyses show that low Pearson correlation coefficients can be applied to flag extraordinary instances of either high or low national citation impacts during a period. Most importantly, the graphical maps make a strong case for adjusting or tuning the baseline impact to the actual national publication profiles when comparing NIFs of different countries. A new indicator, the Tuned Citation Impact Index (TCII) is proposed. It is constructed from the amount of expected citations a country ought to have received in each research field aggregated over its true profile. Common baseline profiles, like those of the world or EU, are consequently not regarded as the ideal benchmark. In the case illustrated by the journal publications of the social sciences the paper verifies the hypothesis that a dominant central cluster exists consisting of the large Anglo‐American countries: USA, Canada and the UK. A further hypothesis, that the smaller northern EU countries with English as the second language are located together and close to the central cluster on the publication maps is only partly satisfied in the second period. A third hypothesis, that countries located near the central cluster on the citation maps may hold high(er) NIFs is falsified.