Background Paper: Where are social sciences produced?

In this paper, we raise the question of the world distribution of scientific publications on social sciences through a quantitative analysis of peer-reviewed journals and papers. Specifically, we analyze the changing patterns in scientific collaborations between countries and regions. In order to measure the relative use of social scientists’ foreign production of papers, we look at the distribution of inter-citations between countries and regions. Our research shows that beyond a general growth in the world production of papers and journals in the social sciences, the effect of research’s globalization and internationalization essentially favoured the large, already dominant actors (i.e., Europe and North America). There was a decrease in the autonomy of other regions, whose dependence upon central actors (as measured by citations and collaboration) increased over the last 20 years. While Europe certainly increased its centrality and is now comparable to North America, the major emerging actor is China. In terms of published papers and scientific collaborations, its presence increased rapidly from the mid-1980s onward.