Page 19 - IDEA Study 1 2016 Publication Output

In Chart 2a, the colors of individual discipline symbols identify the wider group the discipline belongs to in the WoS. The Czech Republic has the weakest position in the Social Sciences group (purple symbols), both in overall and outstanding publication output. All social science fields in the Czech Republic show low overall publication output and an extremely low outstanding publication output, and can therefore be found at the very bottom left of the chart. Similarly as in the aforementioned Agricultural Economics & Policy field, social science fields (such as Political Science) tend to have a large percentage of articles in WoS journals published in the Czech Republic, which often publish predominantly Czech authors, a large proportion of articles written in Czech or Slovak, and a great degree of self-citation. We will discuss this issue later in more detail. In contrast, the Czech Republic has the best position in discipline groups Natural Sciences and Engineering & Technology (red and blue symbols). Chart 2a reveals that there is a roughly linear relationship between the overall and outstanding publishing output in various fields. However, most fields show a larger overall output compared to internationally compared output published in prestigious journals. Chart 2b shows the position of specific noteworthy scientific fields. Circle colors indicate deviations in the rate of increase of the number of articles in each field in the Czech Republic, compared to the average rate of increase in all the other countries.22 Such a comparison allows us to determine whether fields with a relatively poor output compared to the international average (half of which corresponds to other EU countries from the former Soviet bloc) have been improving their position over time, or have been growing faster than the average growth rate in all the compared countries. 22 Dark green and light green indicate a significantly and slightly above-average growth respectively; red and yellow indicate significantly and slightly below-average respectively. Fields where the starting point is too low to determine a reliable growth rate (the total number of articles in the years 2010–2014 was less than 50) are marked in gray. 17