The traditional view of scholarly publication practices among librarians and academics is that researchers in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields publish journal articles, social scientists publish both articles and books, and humanists publish books, predominantly. In “More journal articles and fewer books: publication practices in the social sciences in the 2010s,” Savage and Olejniczak examine publishing activity of social science faculty members in 12 disciplines at 290 Ph.D. granting institutions in the United States between 2011 and 2019 to test assumptions about current publishing trends in the social sciences. They asked:
- have publication practices changed such that more or fewer books and articles are written now than in the recent past?
- has the percentage of scholars actively participating in a particular publishing type changed over time?
- do different age cohorts evince different publication strategies?
The three age cohorts were early career, mid career and senior scholars across the disciplines of anthropology, criminal justice and criminology, economics, educational psychology, geography, international affairs and development, political science, psychology, public administration, public policy, social work/social welfare, and sociology. Using the Academic Analytics database, the authors culled peer-reviewed articles that are assigned DOIs and academic book publications. For each discipline and each year, they calculated the number of articles per faculty, the number of books per faculty, and the number of books per article. They tabulated number of faculty and academic departments in each discipline for each year, and the percentage change between 2011 and 2019.
The number of faculty in each of the 12 disciplines increased over the time span of the study with the exception of educational psychology which had a 1.2% decrease. By contrast, international affairs and development had a 39.1% increase in the number of faculty, by far the largest increase. Across all disciplines, the ratio of book to article publication in 2011 and 2019 decreased, as did the percentage of scholars who published a book. Meanwhile, there was a positive percentage change in the number of journal articles published across disciplines. These trends were consistent across age cohorts, though they were more pronounced among early career researchers.
The authors provide granular data by discipline and age cohort, and the anonymized data, scripts and statistical results are made available. They discuss the reasons journal article publications are on the rise compared with books. Their observations include the more egalitarian nature of article publishing compared with books, the importance of building a scholarly reputation through article publication, the changing nature of social science research, and the influence of performance-based research assessment systems on publishing decisions. All lead to the conclusion that article publication has become the dominant form of research dissemination in the social sciences.