Comprehensive bibliographic coverage of the social sciences and humanities in a citation index: an empirical analysis of the potential

A well-designed and comprehensive citation index for the social sciences and humanities has many potential uses, but has yet to be realised. Significant parts of the scholarly production in these areas are not published in international journals, but in national scholarly journals, in book chapters or in monographs. The potential for covering these literatures more comprehensively can now be investigated empirically using a complete publication output data set from the higher education sector of an entire country (Norway). We find that while the international journals in the social sciences and humanities are rather small and more dispersed in specialties, representing a large but not unlimited number of outlets, the domestic journal publishing, as well as book publishing on both the international and domestic levels, show a concentration of many publications in few publication channels. These findings are promising for a more comprehensive coverage of the social sciences and humanities.