Exploration of the Bibliometric Coordinates for the Field of 'Geography'

This study is a bibliometric analysis of a highly complex research discipline, namely geography, in order to identify the most used and cited publication channels, to reveal publication strategies, and to analyse the discipline’s coverage in the three main data sources for citation analyses: Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. The results show very heterogeneous and individual publication strategies when considering the selection of adequate publication channels even in the same research fields. Monographs, journal articles (including proceedings papers) and book chapters are the most cited document types. Differences between research fields more related to the natural sciences than to the social sciences are clearly visible but not so considerable when taking into account the higher number of co-authors. General publication strategies are more established in the fields related to the natural sciences. Although an “iceberg citation model” is suggested, citation analyses for monographs, book chapters and reports (working papers) should be conducted separately and include complementary data sources, such as Google Scholar, in order to enhance the coverage and improve the quality of the citation analysis. Conference Topics Citation and co-citation analysis – Social Sciences Introduction and background From a bibliometric point of view, geography is a very challenging discipline, because it belongs to the natural sciences (geography, physical) as well as to the social sciences (geography), as it is clearly depicted in each edition of Journal Citation Reports (see Table 1). Table 1. Category data of geography in both Editions of JCR (2013) Table 1 shows very different citation characteristics according to the corresponding JCR edition. Furthermore, geography is a highly interdisciplinary field, very strongly related to geosciences, environmental sciences, ecology and remote sensing (natural sciences), or to economics, urban studies and political sciences (social science), as a quick search and refine analysis in WoS (Web of Sciences core collection) illustrates. Although there are many studies illustrating the differences between natural and social sciences and the different publication cultures depending on the discipline (e.g. Nederhof, 2006; Australian Research Council, 2012; Ossenblok et al., 2012; van Leeuwen, 2013; Moksony, 2014), no literature focusing on this specific could be retrieved by the authors. The main research questions of this study are: • What are the publication characteristics depending on the different research field? • Can differences be observed concerning research fields? What is their time evolution? JCR EDITION 2013 Category Total Cites Median IF Aggre gate IF Aggre gate Imme diacy Index Aggre gate Cited HalfLife # Journals # Articles Sciences GEOGRAPHY, PHYSICAL 159297 2.152 2.574 0.72 7.5 46 4972 Social Sciences GEOGRAPHY 79207 1.059 1.612 0.343 7.4 76 3762