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The Four Literatures Of Social Science, Diana M. Hicks

Diana Hicks

This chapter reviews bibliometric studies of the social sciences and humanities. SSCI bibliometrics will work reasonably well in economics and psychology whose literature shares many characteristics with science, and less well in sociology, characterized by a typical social science literature. The premise of the chapter is that quantitative evaluation of research output faces severe methodological difficulties in fields whose literature differs in nature from scientific literature. Bibliometric evaluations are based on international journal literature indexed in the SSCI, but social scientists also publish books, and write for national journals and for the non-scholarly press. These literatures form distinct, yet partially …