Scientific production of Spanish universities in the fields of Social Sciences and Language

The article concludes by suggesting new lines of study for determining the factors that may explain the existing patterns of scientific production, and for identifying useful bibliometric measures aiming at an assessment of this type of literature.

Abstract

This article reviews the scientific production of the Spanish universities in the areas of Social Sciences and Language Sciences during the period 1986–1988. A series of quantitative criteria are being applied to the submission of data on total scientific production, productivity rate, publications/authors ratio, coauthorship, type of documents edited and their distribution, all of them broken down per university. Last but not least, a review is made of the distribution by subjects of each publication. The results obtained underline the increasing rate of production achieved in the three-year period, a certain stagnation in the number of authors and in team research activities, a far too endogamic diffusion in periodical publications and a somewhat unbalanced thematic diversification as compared to the geographical and cultural variety of our country. The article concludes by suggesting new lines of study for determining the factors that may explain the existing patterns of scientific production, and for identifying useful bibliometric measures aiming at an assessment of this type of literature.