Bibliometry from a Global Perspective: Library and Classroom Outreach and the Future Ranking of Political Scientists and Publishers (Global Political Studies Series)

This book, written by a political scientist born in the global North but now based in one of the departments of his discipline in the Republic of South Africa, is an attempt to focus on the global geography of political science and its global reach. All too often, the world view of scholars is shaped by the 'lens' of the global North, and there is little awareness of how the products of our scholarship are distributed in the world's libraries and classrooms, and of the structures of centre and periphery that characterise the field. At the heart of our bibliometric considerations, beyond the usual citation indicators based on Scopus, arguably the most complete database of its kind in the world, is the idea of measuring the presence of scientific authors and/or book publishers in the world's library systems as well as in the world's lecture halls. These indicators - called Libcitation and Classroom Citation - are discussed and developed in the various sections of our book. As we show, the claim of "global political science" must now be challenged by the harsh reality of the regional concentration of our discipline in the Western countries of the world, as evidenced by the fact that the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States alone account for two-fifths of all political science titles recorded worldwide in Scopus-indexed journals from 1996 to 2021, and, also for more than 50% of the world's academic libraries recorded in OCLC WorldCat. Worse still, no less than two-thirds of the "global" political science journals indexed in Scopus are published in these three countries! With all the weaknesses of our new evaluation systems, which were first presented in German in a series of articles in the Gruyter journal Bibliotheksdienst, and which are now being presented step by step in an expanded English version, substantially supplemented by new contributions and perspectives, claim to be an innovation in a global academic world in which the "ranking" of scholarly communities and academic book publishers is unfortunately becoming more and more important. Our ranking systems focus on the real presence of scholarship around the globe.