Measuring Research Excellence witMeasuring with Two Journals in Social Sciences: A Scientometric Sketch

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Citation Study, and Content analysis are the concepts supplementary and complementary to each other in their respective applications in the domain of research which are most popular tools extensively used in the field of Library and Information Science. This technique has been applied in the present study to evaluate Social Sciences research productivity at a global context for obtaining necessary inferences.To avoid confusion it would be worthwhile to point out here that, though the data undertaken from papers indexed in Science Direct Bibliographic Database top 25 hottest papers covering the time period 2006-2010, but the growth pattern of publications across several time zones as indicated in this paper are variably denotes the period 1996-2010, because, the papers are appeared in the top 25 hottest papers site under the period 2006-2010 which were actually published in the 1st journal (CPCS) and also in 2nd journal (ES) within the period 1996-2010. Hence, the growth pattern of papers is made considering their actual year of publication in the concerned journals instead of taking into account the year under which the papers appeared in Science Direct Database hottest papers site.1. IntroductionBibliometrics and scientometrics are the two closely related approaches for measuring scientific publications and science in general, respectively. In practice, much of the work that fall under this header involves various types of citation analysis, which looks at how scholars cite one another in publications. In the context of this toolkit, bibliometrics are also one of the key ways of measuring the impact of scholarly publications. 'Scientometrics' is often done using bibliometrics which is a measurement of the impact of (scientific) publications. Modern scientometrics is mostly based on the work of DerekJ.de SollaPriceand EugeneGarfield. The latter founded the Institute for Scientific Information which is heavily used for scientometric analysis. Methods of research include qualitative, quantitative and computational approaches. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientometrics accessedon15.12.11).Over the years, the Scientometric techniques have become tools to evaluate the productivity of research institutes, individual researchers and to map the growth of the respective subject. Publication and citation counts are being extensively used for evaluation purpose (Koganuramath et. al., 2002 Davarpanah, 2009; Bechhofer et. al., 2001; and Thanuskodi,2010). The studies undertaken by the above researchers comprehensively focus on the assessment of strengths and weaknesses in the Social Sciences research performance in an international context and discussed the identification of patterns of scientific development, particularly the mapping of research activities of varied organizations, institutions, scholars/researchers, etc.2. Review of LiteratureThe internationalization of social science research in developing countries mainly takes the form of a growing dependence on citations of papers produced in Europe and North America, and can be measured by the geographical origins of the references in social science journals (Gingras and Mosbah-Natanson; 2010). Internationalization thus, tends to reinforce the centrality of the West over the rest of the world.The hegemony of the North in the social science production is not only obvious from a linguistic standpoint. Four countries - the USA, the UK, the Netherlands and Germany - produce two-thirds of the social science journals registered in the most encompassing of the social science journals' databases. North America alone produced in the last ten years more than half of the social science articles registered in the Thomson SSCI database. Europe is the second producer, and published almost 40 per cent of the world's social science articles in the past decade (GingrasandMosbah-Natanson;2010). …