JournalBase - Une étude comparative internationale des bases de données des revues scientifiques en sciences humaines et sociales (SHS)

Abstract

A comparative table are the contents of the databases that inventory the journals in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH), of the Web of Science (published by Thomson Reuters) and of Scopus (published by Elsevier), as well as of the lists European Reference Index for Humanities (ERIH) (published by the European Science Foundation and of the French Agence pour l'Evaluation de la Recherche et de l'Enseignement Supérieur (AERES) has been presented here for the first time in June 2009.With some 20,000 entries, this was an almost exhaustive overview of the wealth of publications in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, at last made available in this table, adopting the same nomenclature for classing the journals according to their disciplines as the one used in 27 workstations of the European Science Foundation. The multiple assignments reveal the multidisciplinarity of the journals, which is quite frequent in SSH, but also sometimes the incoherence of databases that have not been corrected.The research was carried out in 2008 with the financial support of the TGE Adonis of the CNRS.The final objective of this project, which concerns the entire international community of the Social Sciences and the Humanities, was to put online, in a bilingual English/French version, the database of JournalBase in interactive mode on a collaborative platform, as well as the final report of the study, so that the decision-makers, the scientists, the experts in scientific information have access to up-to-date information, and so that they may contribute to forward movement in the reflection on these questions, through the exchange of experiences and of good working practices.An article presenting the history of the project, the method we developed, the encountered difficulties has been published on January 9th, 2010. JournalBase is now available in English on : http://journalbase.cnrs.fr