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Ukrainian Arts and Humanities research in Scopus: A Bibliometric
Analysis
Serhii Nazarovets1*, Olesya Mryglod2
1 Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, 18/2 Bulvarno-Kudriavska Str., 04053 Kyiv, Ukraine
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5067-4498
2 Institute for Condensed Matter Physics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine,
1 Svientsitskii St., 79011 Lviv, Ukraine
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4415-7061
This is the submitted version of a paper published in Library Hi Tech (Accepted
18-Jul-2023).
Please cite as:
Nazarovets, S. and Mryglod, O. (2023), "Ukrainian Arts and Humanities Research in
Scopus: A Bibliometric Analysis", Library Hi Tech.
https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-05-2023-0180
Abstract
Purpose – This article presents the results of a quantitative analysis of Ukrainian Arts and
Humanities (A&H) research from 2012 to 2021, as observed in Scopus. The overall
publication activity and the relative share of A&H publications in relation to Ukraine's total
research output, comparing them with other countries. The study analyzes the diversity and
total number of sources, as well as the geographic distribution of authors and citing authors,
to provide insights into the internationalization level of Ukrainian A&H research. Additionally,
the topical spectrum and language usage are considered to complete the overall picture.
Design/methodology/approach – This study uses the Scopus database as the primary
data source for analyzing the general bibliometric characteristics of Ukrainian A&H research.
All document types, except Erratum, were considered. A language filter was applied to
compare the bibliometric characteristics of English versus non-English publications. In
addition to directly imported data from Scopus, the study employs the ready-to-use SciVal
tools to operate with A&H subcategories and calculate additional bibliometric characteristics,
such as Citations per Publication (CPP), Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), and journal
quartiles. Information on the country of journal publishers and details on delisted journals
from Scopus were obtained from the official Source Title List available on the Elsevier
website and the SCImago Journal & Country Rank Portal.
Findings – According to our results, the publication patterns for Ukrainian A&H research
exhibit dynamics comparable to those of other countries, with a gradual increase in the total
number of papers and sources. However, the citedness is lower than expected, and the
share of publications in top-quartile sources is lower for 2020-2021 period compared to the
previous years. The impact of internationally collaborative papers, especially those in
English, is higher. Nevertheless, over half of all works remain uncited, probably due to the
limited readership of the journals selected for publication.
Originality/value – This study provides original insights into the bibliometric characteristics
of Ukrainian A&H publications between 2012 and 2021, as assessed using the Scopus
database. Our findings reveal that Ukraine's A&H publications have higher visibility than
some Asian countries with similar population sizes. However, in comparison to other
countries of similar size, Ukraine's research output is smaller. We also discovered that
cultural and historical similarities with neighboring countries play a more significant role in
publication activity than population size. Our study highlights the low integration of Ukrainian
A&H research into the global academic community, evident through a decline in papers
published in influential journals and poor citedness. These findings underscore the
importance for authors to prioritize disseminating research in influential journals, rather than
solely focusing on indexing in particular databases.
Keywords Bibliometric, Arts and Humanities, Ukraine, Language, Scopus
1. Introduction
As early as 1948, Ukrainian-American linguist George Yurii Shevelov, writing under the
pseudonym S. Yurskyi, expressed the following view: "The world turns to Ukrainian science
when it is interested in internal Ukrainian issues; and that he is far more often interested in
questions of a wider order – pan-Slavic or Eastern European, and these questions have not
been worked out by Ukrainian science, then there is nothing to be surprised that in such
cases the world turns to those scientific works that raise these questions'' (Yurskyi, 1948). In
our century Wiljan van den Akker (2016, p. 26) wrote something very similar: “Writing only in
Dutch about Dutch poetry, will be absolutely the best guarantee that the world stays ignorant
about the subject”. These remarks highlight a dilemma that is widely discussed in the context
of Arts and Humanities (A&H). On the one hand, it is natural to expect these disciplines to
focus on locally nested problems (Petr et al., 2021; Sivertsen, 2016). On the other hand,
Pasteur wrote: "Scientists have a country; science has none." (Von Gizycki, 1973),
emphasizing the universal nature of science, particularly in terms of knowledge sharing.
Even a locally nested problem can be intriguing as a case study contributing to the global
understanding. Furthermore, the analytical methods and tools employed can be adapted not
only to investigate a similar local problem on the other side of the globe but also to other
disciplines.
Thus, scientific communication serves as the foundation for the entire edifice of science.
Within this context, the “local versus international” dilemma is closely linked to the issue of
language selection. On one hand, scientists may prefer to use their native language for
effective communication with a domestic audience, particularly for interdisciplinary matters;
for developing research terminology in the national language, and for writing popular science
works and textbooks primarily targeting the domestic market (Amano et al., 2016). On the
other hand, a lingua franca must be employed to make research findings accessible for
foreign readers, share study results with the widest possible audience, and receive
constructive feedback from peers. Moreover, journals indexed in core citation databases,
which mainly include English-language publications (Albarillo, 2014; Liu, 2017), have better
impact and visibility because scientists use these tools and metrics to find relevant
peer-reviewed papers, whereas journals publishing articles in the vernacular appeal to a
smaller readership (Dinkel et al., 2004; Sanz-Casado et al., 2021).
The presentation and dissemination of research findings embody a nuanced duality,
particularly within the A&H disciplines. This is due to numerous researchers conducting
locally-nested research and publishing their results in local journals, which significantly differ
from international journals. Consequently, accurate evaluation of visibility and impact of
these works on the scientific community becomes challenging (Sanz-Casado et al., 2021).
The goal of this study is to quantify the Ukrainian research output in A&H based on Scopus
data and perform country-wise comparison. The focus on Ukraine presents a compelling and
relevant case within the A&H context, given the country's rich linguistic and cultural heritage.
This is complemented by Ukraine's distinctive political landscape, as it expressed a strong
preference for European integration after gaining its independence. Consequently, Ukraine
seeks to assert its presence on the global stage, including the representation of its national
research contributions across various A&H disciplines to the wider scientific community.
However, achieving this goal within the A&H domain poses inherent challenges, as authors
and readers actively utilize regional channels of scientific communication, unlike their
counterparts in the natural sciences (Franssen and Wouters, 2019).
Examining how a multi-ethnic state with a diverse historical and cultural heritage addresses
this issue is of great interest. Furthermore, the Russian-Ukrainian military confrontation,
which began in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea, has had a significant impact on
Ukrainian humanities scholars. They have experienced specific social upheavals that
undoubtedly influence the nature of humanities research conducted in the country and the
broader region. Hence, this study aims to provide a unique bibliometric record of the
transformative processes that have unfolded in recent years within the Ukrainian A&H field.
Moreover, it will significantly contribute to a deeper understanding of contemporary
humanitarian challenges in Eastern Europe.
The research questions addressed in this work are as follows:
RQ1. What are the general bibliometric characteristics of Ukrainian output in the field of A&H
as observed through commonly used international databases, which serve as data sources
for quantitative description of research?
The quantitative results are of particular interest to Ukrainian science policymakers and
managers, as they oversee national assessment procedures and develop requirements for
academic stuff. These results can also contribute to cross-country studies in A&H.
RQ2. How are Ukrainian A&H research represented on an international scale, particularly
among English-speaking colleagues?
The answer to this question contributes to the existing body of research that explores
various aspects of language usage in research, especially in the field of A&H.
The structure of this paper is as follows: a brief overview of research assessment
peculiarities worldwide, with a specific focus on Ukraine, is presented in the section
‘Background’. The section 'Data and Methods' outlines the sources and characteristics of the
publication dataset used in our research. The main results are presented and discussed in
several subsections of the ‘Results and interpretations’ section. Finally, the 'Discussion and
Conclusions' section includes a summary and a discussion of the research limitations.
2. Background
2.1 Bibliometrics in the Arts & Humanities
The A&H research is heterogeneous, and scientists in these disciplines use different types of
publications and languages (Blidstein and Zhitomirsky-Geffet, 2022; Kellsey and Knievel,
2004; Melchiorsen, 2019; Nederhof, 2006; Yang and Qi, 2021). The most popular citation
databases, such as Web of Science (WoS) or Scopus, which are usually exploited as more
reliable data sources for bibliometric analysis, are characterized by poorer coverage of
Humanities. Therefore, they cannot be used to obtain representative data samples for
comprehensive evaluations of this field (Archambault et al., 2006; Borrego et al., 2023;
Kulczycki et al., 2020; Mongeon and Paul-Hus, 2016). As a result, the bibliometric
community rightly treats the use of quantitative assessment methods in the humanities with
great caution (Hug and Ochsner, 2014; Ochsner et al., 2017; Pedersen et al., 2020).
However, despite these limitations, scientometrics has great potential for quantitatively
describing scientific disciplines, including A&H, if the analysis is performed correctly and
the interpretation takes into account the contexts. In particular, bibliometric analysis can be
successfully used by scholars to reveal the typical publication patterns at the levels of
journals, individual authors, or research institutions, to explore collaboration patterns
(Donthu et al., 2021; Kwiek, 2021; Vílchez-Román et al., 2020; Wijewickrema, 2022), or to
study the spread of innovative technologies (Agarwal et al., 2022; Liu et al., 2019; Su et al.,
2019). In recent years, scholars specializing in scientometrics from diverse countries have
extensively conducted bibliometric analyses on national research output within the domain of
A&H, utilizing essential core citation databases (for instance: Ardanuy et al., 2022; Bui Hoai
et al., 2021; Golub et al., 2020; Mohsen, 2021; Vlase and Lähdesmäki, 2023). Moreover, the
results of such research performed in the context of a particular country (see, e.g., Mryglod
et al., 2021) can be used to improve national regulations of scientific activity or to perform
cross-country analysis. Finally, there is a need to audit relevant information contained in
popular databases, as they often serve as the first lens for creating the image of the national
Art and Humanities field for the global scientific community (Márquez and Porras, 2020).
2.2 Context of Ukraine
Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus data are used in Ukraine to assess the scientific
productivity of humanitarians on par with scientists from all other scientific disciplines. The
Ukrainian national research evaluation is rather unsystematic and heavily relies on simple
quantitative indicators, without considering the specific context of each discipline. This is
particularly important for A&H (Hladchenko, 2022; Nazarovets, 2022). Despite the
significance attributed to quantitative data and the unprecedented reliance of Ukrainian
officials on indicators derived from these key citation databases, a comprehensive
quantitative analysis of Ukrainian humanitarian studies has not yet been conducted.
As one of the countries with a small research output (see, e.g. Ayan et al., 2023), Ukraine
rarely appears on a map of cross-country scientometric research (e.g., Ma et al., 2022;
Wang, 2023). However, a few studies by Ukrainian scientometricians focusing on certain
issues of the functioning and development of Ukrainian science, with particular attention to
Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), can be found. For example, Kavunenko et al. (2006)
conducted a comparative analysis of journals in the Social Sciences and Humanities of
Ukraine and the world. Hladchenko and Moed (2021) examined the role of national journals
in promoting research results at the local level, which also helps in meeting specific
requirements of the Ukrainian national scientific policy. The large-scale bibliometric analysis
of the Ukrainian Economics discipline which represents SSH, based on Scopus and Crossref
data was performed by Mryglod et al., 2021 and Mryglod et al., 2022.
3. Data and methods
We chose to use the Scopus database as a data source for this study because it is one of
the two most popular citation databases utilized for bibliometric analysis. Additionally,
Scopus provides more consistent chronological coverage of Ukrainian humanities
publications compared to WoS databases. Furthermore, while relevant publications can be
found in both the specialized database Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and the
relatively new database Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) on the WoS Core
Collection platform, the Ukrainian national subscription only offers back files starting from
2015 for ESCI. Consequently, conducting an analysis based on WoS Core Collection data
would lead to a rapid increase in the number of publications starting in 2015, which is an
artifact of content indexing in the database rather than a true reflection of the publishing
behavior of Ukrainian authors.
The following search query was used in Scopus to collect the data: ‘AFFILCOUNTRY
(Ukraine) AND SUBJAREA (ARTS) AND PUBYEAR < 2022 AND PUBYEAR > 2011’. All
types of documents except Erratum were taken into account. Thus, we attribute to Ukraine
all the documents, where at least one author’s affiliation is related to Ukraine.
To compare the bibliometric characteristics of English vs non-English publications, a
language filter was applied. In addition to analyzing data directly imported from Scopus,
SciVal tools were used to operate with the subcategories of A&H and calculate additional
bibliometric characteristics such as citations per publication (CPP), Field-Weighted Citation
Impact (FWCI), and quartiles of journals. The official Source title list available on the Elsevier
website1and the SCImago Journal & Country Rank Portal2were used to obtain information
about the country of the journal publisher (since there is no information about the publishing
country directly in Scopus) and the details about delisting the journals from Scopus. The
starting year of journal indexing in Scopus and its Source-Normalized Impact per Paper
(SNIP) score can be found on the journal profile pages in Scopus. The dataset was collected
on February 7, 2023.
4. Results and interpretations
4.1 Number of publications
A total of 3,743 documents3published between 2012 and 2021, and indexed in the Scopus
database for the “Arts and Humanities” subject area, are considered. It is interesting to note
that this data sample has the potential to be larger, but approximately one-third of
documents can be 'lost’ for Ukraine due to the incompleteness of scholarly metadata
(Mryglod and Nazarovets, 2023).
The Ukrainian output in A&H is only partially visible via Scopus, but a similar situation can be
observed for other countries (Kulczycki et al., 2018). Nonetheless, these data reflect the
overall picture of the disciplinary area as perceived by the global community. While absolute
estimations of the number of publications may lack informative value without additional
context, it is reasonable to conduct the country-wise comparisons. In other words, it makes
sense to use the same imperfect instrument to draw general conclusions about the state of
the discipline within different national research systems.
Another problem arises when selecting countries for comparison with Ukrainian A&H. The
development of disciplines within this field can be highly influenced by various factors such
as local history, culture, language, and more. It is impossible to find two countries with
identical heritage. In this study, we aim to compare countries based on population similarity
(as the size of a country can impact on publication statistics (Kulczycki et al., 2018)) and
geopolitical position. However, it is important to note that such a choice is always somewhat
arbitrary. Therefore, we consider the closeness of countries to Ukraine in a list of countries
sorted by population in 2020, as well as the diversity of their other characteristics, to
determine the initial group of countries for further comparison:
● Ukraine (43.7 million) – developing4Eastern European Post-Soviet country;
● Canada (37.7 million) – developed bilingual non-European country;
● Poland (37.8 million) – developing Eastern European Country neighboring with
Ukraine;
● Argentina (45.2 million) – developing non-European country;
● Spain (46.8 million) – developed European country;
● Iraq (40.2 million) – developing Asian country;
● Uzbekistan (33.5 million) – developing Asian Post-Soviet country.
Three countries – the principally dissimilar ones – are considered in some cases simply to
add more global context:
● USA (331 million) – developed non-European English-speaking country, in TOP3
countries with the largest population;
● United Kingdom (67.9 million) – developed European English-speaking country;
● China (1439.3 million) – a developing Asian country, the World leader by population.
The second group joins several countries which have common borders (and, thus, partially
share the historical context) with Ukraine:
● Hungary (9.7 million);
● Romania (19.2 million);
● Slovakia (5.5 million);
● Poland (37.8 million).
Figure 1. The annual numbers of A&H publications in Scopus by authors from
various countries: (a) countries closest to Ukraine by population but characterized by
various economic and geopolitical positions plus English-speaking larger countries
(USA and UK), and China, the largest country representing the Eastern part of the
World; (b) countries that share a common border with Ukraine and, therefore,
hypothetically have more cultural and historical similarities.
The annual numbers of A&H outputs related to countries from the first and second groups
are shown in Fig. 1. It can be observed that Ukraine is more visible via Scopus lenses
compared to the Asian countries but less visible when compared to other countries of similar
‘caliber’, Fig. 1a. The Ukrainian output is also smaller than the output related to neighboring
countries. In this context, one could speculate that the larger internal community of experts
implies a lesser dependency on external audiences (Kulczycki et al., 2018). However, the
number of publications for Poland is higher not only compared to slightly larger Ukraine but
also compared to much smaller countries (Fig. 1b).
While the absolute numbers differ among countries (sometimes varying by orders of
magnitude), similar dynamics can be found. There is a gradual increase in the number of
A&H publications by Ukrainian authors. This increase, characterized by varying rates, can
also be seen for countries such as Poland, Spain, and Argentina. On the other hand, the
outputs related to the United Kingdom, USA, and Canada, which share the common English
language at least partially, as well as Romania and Hungary, exhibit rather constant annual
values. It is evident that the increasing patterns cannot be solely explained by the global
growth of scientific literature (Fortunato et al., 2018; Price, 1963). To determine whether the
share of A&H in the total output is increasing, the relative numbers are calculated next.
Figure 2. The annual shares of A&H publications in Scopus by authors from different
countries: the list of the countries for (a) and (b) panels is the same as in Figure 1.
According to Scopus data, A&H papers accounted for approximately 2.7% of Ukraine's total
scholarly output from 2012 to 2021. Country-wise comparisons of the annual values for the
same groups of countries can be made, see Fig. 2. It can be observed that not only the
absolute values but also the shares of A&H publications increased in Ukraine, rising from 1%
in 2012-2014 to around 4.5% in 2020-2021. A similar dynamic, almost doubling, was
observed for Poland and Argentina, while other countries showed a slower increase or even
a decrease in relative numbers.
It is difficult to distill the separate factors that impact the observed tendencies. Clearly, the
motivation of Ukrainian authors in A&H to publish their results in the sources indexed in
international databases increases, even when compared to other disciplines. This may be a
consequence of the gradual shift in the culture of scholarly communication as well as the
changing rules of the national research evaluation system (e.g., since 2014, there has been
an encouragement to publish results in foreign sources, and since 2018, a minimum number
of publications visible in Scopus and/or Web of Science is required).
The following question arises: What approaches do Ukrainian authors adapt to achieve
desired visibility in international databases? One way is to make greater efforts to publish
results in already indexed sources, predominantly foreign ones. Another way is to promote
national journals to expand the available space for Ukrainian publications. To examine the
situation, an analysis at the level of source titles is conducted.
4.2 Sources
According to Scopus data, A&H papers by Ukrainian authors published between 2012 and
2021 can be found in 761 Sources. As shown in Figure 3 (left vertical scale), the number of
different sources containing Ukrainian papers has been constantly increasing. The most
remarkable increase in such sources” for Ukrainian A&H was observed in 2017 (the number
of sources increased by almost 50%) and
2019 (another 33% increase). The countries
with the TOP20 sources5(see Table 1)
containing the largest number of Ukrainian
A&H papers for each year between 2012 and
2021 were examined. Figure 3 (right vertical
scale) reveals that the number of Ukrainian
sources used for publication by Ukrainian
authors doubled in two subsequent years after
2018. Evidently, the growth of Ukrainian A&H
output is realized through an increase in
papers by Ukrainian authors in foreign
editions, as well as the inclusion of new
Ukrainian source titles in the Scopus database
(such as journals published in Ukraine; book
editions, where at least one Ukrainian editor is
found; conference proceedings, where
Ukrainian institution is one of the organizers).
Figure 3 Annual statistics for (i) the number of
source titles containing A&H papers by
Ukrainian authors (left vertical axis and line
plot) and (ii) the share of source titles published in Ukraine in respect to the TOP20 most
frequent ones (right vertical axis and bar diagram) between 2012 and 2012.
While indexing in authoritative international databases is sometimes considered a guarantee
of the worldwide visibility of a scientific journal, it can be shown that this is not a sufficient
indicator of internationality. The latter is rather defined by the language of publications and
their topical spectrum. In turn, the characteristics of authors and readers indicate the
wideness of the audience. This aspect is especially crucial for the A&H area, where the
already mentioned “local versus international” dilemma exists (Sivertsen, 2016; Petr et al.,
2021). The deep analysis of the internationality of sources is beyond the scope of this paper,
but some preliminary results are shown in Table 1. The variations of two indicators of
national geographical orientation of a journal discussed in (Moed, 2020) are used here. The
shares of papers published by authors belonging exclusively6to the most contributing
country are calculated for each journal (column 6). The geography of the citing authors is
analyzed in the same way: the share of citing documents, where all authors exclusively
belong to a single country – a leader by the number of citing publications – is calculated for
each journal (column 8).
One can see that over one-half of all papers in most cases (highlighted by the bold font in
Table 1) are not internationally collaborative and originate from a single country. It is possible
to find definitions of local or domestic journals that are based on an even lower threshold for
the number of papers authored by local authors (e.g., the value of 33% is mentioned in (Petr
et al., 2021)). While some journals in Table 1 can be referred to as more domestic due to the
dominant share of papers exclusively from the home country (e.g., “Ukrainian Geographical
Journal” for Ukraine or “Analele Universitatii din Craiova – Seria Stiinte Filologice,
Lingvistica'' for Romania), others are targeted at countries other than their own (e.g.,
“Stratum Plus'', “Rusin”, “Bylye Gody'' which are defined as Moldavian or Slovakian, but
predominantly publish papers by Russian authors). Similarly, one can speculate about the
nationally oriented readership of the journals: a significant portion of citing documents can be
attributed to a single country.
It should be noted that not all journals are represented in Scopus with complete archives.
Furthermore, one journal has been discontinued in Scopus due to “Publication Concerns”.
Table 1. Description of the TOP20 A&H sources with the highest number of publications by
Ukrainian authors in the Scopus database within the period 2012-20217.The corresponding
country names are highlighted in bold if the values in columns 6 or 8 exceed 50%.
Scopus Sources
# of
[2012-
2021]
papers
by
Ukrainian
authors
SNIP (2021)
[Scopus
coverage
years]
Country
of
Scopus
source8
# of
[2012-202
1] papers
in the
journal’s
profile
# (%) of
publications
by authors
exclusively
from [the
most
contributing
country]
# of citing
publications
# (%) of
citing
publications
by authors
exclusively
from [the
most
actively
citing
country]
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Stratum Plus
203
0.715
[2014-2022]
Moldova
941
536 (57%)
[Russian
Federation]
729
421 (57.8%)
[Russian
Federation]
Rusin
155
0.758
[2011-2022]
Moldova
623
323 (51.8%)
[Russian
Federation]
415
230 (55.4%)
[Russian
Federation]
10th International
Conference on
Advanced
Computer
Information
Technologies,
ACIT 2020
139
-
-
-
-
-
-
Psycholinguistics
0.211
[2019-2022]
Ukraine
165
131 (79.4%)
[Ukraine]
112
77 (68.8%)
[Ukraine]
Sententiae
134
0.533
[2015-2022]
Ukraine
173
127 (73.4%)
[Ukraine]
50
42 (84%)
[Ukraine]
Journal of the
National
Academy of
Legal Sciences
of Ukraine
122
discontinued
[2020-2021]
Ukraine
129
117 (90.7%)
[Ukraine]
155
105 (69%)
[Ukraine]
Ukrainian
Geographical
Journal
104
0.237
[2018-2022]
Ukraine
116
94 (81%)
[Ukraine]
85
68 (80%)
[Ukraine]
Shidnij
Svit
79
0.000
[2019-2022]
Ukraine
89
78 (87.6%)
[Ukraine]
7
7 (100%)
[Ukraine]
Codrul
Cosminului
66
0.236
[2013-2022]
Romania
196
64 (32.7%)
[Ukraine]
63
15 (23.8%)
[Ukraine]
Danubius
59
0.102
[2013-2020]
Romania
234
126 (53.8%)
[Romania]
36
12 (33.3%)
[Romania]
Analele
Universitatii din
Craiova - Seria
Stiinte Filologice,
Lingvistica
56
0.187
[2012-2021]
Romania
361
210 (58.2%)
[Romania]
104
29 (27.9%)
[Ukraine]
Bylye Gody
55
1.161
[2012-2022]
Slovakia
1356
1001 (73.8%)
[Russian
Federation]
1173
712 (60.7%)
[Russian
Federation]
East European
Journal of
Psycholinguistics
43
0.151
[2019-2022]
Ukraine
78
38 (48.7%)
[Ukraine]
54
29 (53.7%)
[Ukraine]
Astra Salvensis
42
0.417
[2013-2022]
Romania
1003
301 (30%)
[Russian
Federation]
1109
546 (49.2%)
[Russian
Federation]
Manuscript and
Book Heritage of
Ukraine
40
0.224
[2020-2022]
Ukraine
41
40 (97.6%)
[Ukraine]
3
2 (66.7%)
[Ukraine]
Logos (Lithuania)
37
0.630
[2008-2022]
Lithuania
833
722 (86.7%)
[Lithuania]
211
164 (77.7%)
[Lithuania]
History of
Science and
Technology
36
0.016
[2020-2022]
Ukraine
49
34 (69.4%)
[Ukraine]
30
20 (66.7%)
[Ukraine]
Kyiv-Mohyla
Humanities
Journal
30
0.129
[2019-2022]
Ukraine
41
29 (70.7%)
[Ukraine]
17
5 (29.4%)
[Ukraine]
Cogito
29
0.316
[2018-2022]
Romania
196
71 (36.2%)
[Romania]
82
15 (18.3%)
[Nigeria]
Studia z Filologii
Polskiej i
Slowianskiej
27
0.644
[2011-2021]
Poland
206
107 (51.9%)
[Poland]
48
25 (52.1%)
[Poland]
Similarly, as it is performed for particular journals, the national orientation of the entire
publication set can be estimated. Out of 3,743 Ukrainian A&H publications, 3,051 (81.5%)
are not internationally collaborative and, thus, can be called national in this respect. The
proportion is inverted for the citing documents: only 1,313 (26.3%) out of 4,984 publications
that benefited from Ukrainian A&H works are related exclusively to Ukrainian authors.
However, further analysis of citation impact reveals that a significant share of citations is
attracted by publications involving foreign co-authors.
Seven source titles (and the next edition of the proceedings of the conference ACIT, which
can be considered as the 8th), listed in Table 1, can also be found in the list of the TOP20
sources by the number of citing documents:
● Quaternary International (United Kingdom)
● Stratum Plus (Moldova)
● Rusin (Moldova)
● CEUR Workshop Proceedings (USA)
● Journal of Physical Education and Sport (Romania)
● Quaternary Science Reviews (United Kingdom)
● 2021 11th International Conference on Advanced Computer Information
Technologies, ACIT 2021
● Sententiae (Ukraine)
● Bylye Gody (Slovakia)
● Sustainability (Switzerland)
● Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (Netherlands)
● Astra Salvensis (Romania)
● Sprawozdania Archeologiczne (Poland)
● Journal of the National Academy of Legal Sciences of Ukraine (Ukraine)
● Naukovyi Visnyk Natsionalnoho Hirnychoho Universytetu (Ukraine)
● Ido Movement for Culture (Poland)
● Ukrainian Geographical Journal (Ukraine)
● Estudios de Economia Aplicada (Spain)
● Journal of Advanced Research in Law and Economics (Romania)
● E3S Web of Conferences (France)
To assess not only the “direction” of impact but also its magnitude, the SNIP indicators can
be used. This kind of indicator is used to measure a journal's contextual citation impact,
taking into account the characteristics of the subject field (Moed, 2010). The distribution of
Ukrainian A&H publications according to SNIP journal quartiles is shown in Figure 4.
According to these results, although the absolute number of A&H publications by Ukrainian
authors gradually increased during 2012-2021 in Scopus, the share of work published in the
TOP journals (belonging to the 1st or 2nd quartiles) decreased in the last two years. To
investigate the citation impact in more detail, a more granular subject classification is used in
the next subsection.
Figure 4 The shares of Ukrainian A&H papers published in journals, differentiated by their
SNIP quartiles in 2012-2021.
4.3 Citation Impact in respect of the Disciplinary Profile
42% (1,573) of the 3,743 Ukrainian A&H publications are cited at least once. The share of
non-cited papers is slightly higher (63%) for the dataset containing publications by Ukrainian
authors only, and the annual tendency to have a larger share of cited publications if foreign
authors are involved is preserved.
SciVal allows one to investigate the subject area of publications in more detail (see Table 2).
One can see that a large portion of Ukrainian A&H publications visible via the Scopus
database is represented by History (almost 43% of publications), followed by Language and
Linguistics (26.4%) and Philosophy (17.8%). While some correlation between the number of
outputs and the number of authors is expected, the proportion of authors versus documents
is slightly higher for archaeology compared to the three leading subcategories mentioned
before. It is possible to speculate about the differences in the methods of research: while it is
expected to find historians or philosophers who work alone, teamwork is required to perform,
say, archaeological expeditions. The last two columns of Table 2 give an idea of the impact
of Ukrainian outputs. Curiously, besides the “Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)”
subcategory, the larger average number of citations per publication is found for
“Conservation”. However, it is meaningless to directly compare the citedness for different
disciplinary subcategories, and FWCI indicator should be used instead. This metric is
defined as the ratio of the total citations received by any given paper to the total citations that
would be expected based on the average of that particular topic in the same period (Zanotto
and Carvalho, 2021). “Conservation” appears to be the most impactful according to FWCI
values (last column): the corresponding publications were cited 1.29 times more than
expected. The citedness of publications within the rest of the subcategories of Ukrainian
A&H is poorer than it potentially could be. The weakest citation impact is for ‘Language and
Linguistics’ (FWCI=0.36).
Table 2 Characteristics of publication statistics [2012-2012] related to Ukraine in respect of
Scopus A&H subcategories. Several ASJC (All Science Journal Classification) codes can be
assigned to the same publication here.
Subcategory
Publications
Citations
Authors
CPP
FWCI
History
1608
2232
2355
1.4
0.75
Language and Linguistics
989
819
1179
0.8
0.36
Philosophy
667
880
1075
1.3
0.91
Archaeology (Arts and Humanities)
585
1352
1115
2.3
0.45
Literature and Literary Theory
465
292
505
0.6
0.54
General Arts and Humanities
434
739
722
1.7
0.96
Religious Studies
331
247
458
0.7
0.60
History and Philosophy of Science
227
417
471
1.8
0.48
Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
127
668
436
5.3
0.72
Visual Arts and Performing Arts
113
155
183
1.4
0.88
Conservation
70
263
541
3.8
1.29
Museology
61
45
118
0.7
0.62
Classics
50
34
65
0.7
0.59
Music
34
39
63
1.1
0.97
Total in the Arts and Humanities subject area
3,743
6,525
6,226
1.7
0.68
To determine the subject areas most affected by Ukrainian A&H, we conducted a similar
analysis of disciplinary categories and subcategories of the citing works. According to our
findings, approximately one-third (27.9% to be precise) of citing publications are associated
with Social Sciences; nearly one quarter (24.5%) are related to A&H. Following these
disciplines are Earth and Planetary Sciences (7.5%), Computer Science (5.7%),
Environmental Science (4.8%), Business, Management and Accounting (4.7%), Economics,
Econometrics and Finance (4.3%). In terms of subcategories, History accounts for one-third
(32.3.%) of the citing documents, while Archaeology comprises almost another one-third
(27.9%). These subcategories are followed by Language and Linguistics (21.7%), and
Philosophy (12.8%).
4.4 Document type
The variety of forms that can be used to publish the results in A&H is one of the features that
make this area a very special object for scientometric analysis. It is known that publications
in the form of Books or Book Chapters are more typical for the area of A&H compared to
other disciplines. Still, the share of journal papers indexed in the Scopus database is much
higher. This is expected due to the peculiarities of database coverage, differences in the
process of articles and books writing, etc. The dominant share of publications within our
dataset – 2651 (72%) – corresponds to journal articles. Other types of publications are
significantly less numerous: review – 516, book chapter – 275, conference paper – 190, note
– 40, editorial – 16, book – 15, letter – 4, and short survey – 1.
Figure 5. The annual shares of A&H journal
publications (Article, Review, Note, Editorial,
Letter, Short Survey document types) published
in 2012-2021 by authors from all countries
(squares) and Ukraine (circles).
Scopus' search for all papers within A&H
subject category between 2012 and 2021
irrespectively of the authors’ country allows one
to draw a general conclusion: the proportion of
works published in journals (Article, Review,
Note, Editorial, Letter, Short Survey)9compared
to those published in the form of books (Book
Chapter, Book)10 is about 2:1. This proportion
cannot be considered characteristic of the A&H
area in general due to the limitations of
database coverage. For example, a smaller gap
between the shares of journal and book
publications is reported in (Kulczycki et al.,
2018), where the data from national scholarly databases for eight European countries are
used. However, it is still reasonable to perform a country-wise comparison of publication
patterns based on the same data source. In particular, Figure 5 shows that the annual share
of journal publications in A&H, irrespective of the country of authors, gradually increases
starting approximately from 2015-2017. The comparison of results for separate countries11
revealed that this tendency holds for all countries, but for some, it is more evident, while for
others, it is less noticeable (e.g., for Ukraine).
It is interesting to note that all A&H book publications by Ukrainian authors visible in Scopus
are written not in Ukrainian, but rather in English, with a few in German.
4.5 Authorship and Collaboration
Art and Humanities papers published by 6,226 Ukrainian authors between 2012 and 2021
are visible via Scopus. The number of unique authors increases every year: over 10 times
more authors were involved in 2021 compared to 2012. Typically, Ukrainian A&H
publications are written by one author (51.9% of all publications). The average number of
authors per paper is 2, but a few atypical documents are authored by the large groups (e.g.,
the reports for large projects: the most collaborative publication by 394 authors contains the
report for one of the EC FP7 Projects12; the report for RESET project13 authored by 192 of its
participants). The averaged value can be considered less informative due to the disciplinary
heterogeneity, as mentioned before. To give an example, 94.7% of works are published by
1–5 authors, and the majority of these publications (72.9%) are also related to Social
Sciences. The other much smaller share (5.3%, only 199) of documents is characterized by
larger co-authorship groups – these works are much less related to Social Sciences (44.7%).
The annual dynamics of the average number of authors per publication can be observed in
Fig. 6 (right vertical scale): if two highly-collaborative project reports mentioned above are
considered, the corresponding average values for 2015 and 2016 are remarkably higher
(circles), while the fluctuations in values are much smaller if just these two documents are
removed from the analysis (dotted region and the corresponding average values for 2015
and 2016). One can see that a slow, but constant increase in average values is
accompanied by an increase in multiple-author publications (see Fig. 6, left vertical scale
and shaded areas).
Figure 6. The annual shares of Ukrainian
A&H publications are categorized by the
sizes of co-authorship teams, i.e. consisting
of 1, 2, 3, or at least 4 authors (left vertical
scale). The corresponding average numbers
of authors per paper are indicated by black
symbols (right vertical scale). Two
publications by large co-authorship groups
are considered outliers that disturb the
average values (circles for 2015 and 2016)
and are therefore omitted during averaging
(black symbols and the dotted region).
The impact of publications in respect to the
size of the co-authorship team can be seen
in Table 3. As mentioned before, the majority
of A&H works are single-authored (and
related only to Ukraine – this is how our data selection is performed), which is consistent
with publishing traditions in the field. But at the same time, this category of publications has
the lowest citation impact, which is more than twice lower compared to the expected value:
FWCI = 0.38. According to the results, collaboration – whether institutional or at the national
level – is associated with a higher citation impact. The most impactful works are published in
co-authorship with foreign colleagues; in this case, the impact is higher than expected, FWCI
= 1,52. Most of the joint papers of Ukrainian humanitarians were written in co-authorship with
scientists from Russia (195), Poland (146), the United States (105), Germany (87), and the
United Kingdom (65).
Table 3. The citedness of Ukrainian A&H publications [2012-2012] in relation to the
characteristics of co-authorship, based on Scopus data.
Publications
Percentage
Citations
CPP
FWCI
International collaboration
624
16.7%
3208
5.1
1.52
Only national collaboration
518
13.8%
746
1.4
0.8
Only institutional collaboration
659
17.6%
915
1.4
0.66
Single authorship
1942
51.9%
1656
0.9
0.38
4.6 Language
According to Scopus data, two-thirds (63%) of Ukrainian A&H publications during 2012-2021
are in English (63%), while only 12.9% are in the official local language – Ukrainian. The
TOP3 most-used languages apart from English are Russian (19.6%), Polish (1.5%), and
German (1.1%). In the previous study, presented at the ISSI 2021 conference (Nazarovets
and Mryglod, 2021), the usage of languages in publications by Ukrainian researchers in
several subfields of Humanities indexed in WoS was investigated. To this end, the study
compared Ukraine with other non-English-speaking countries in Eastern Europe that have
similar post-Soviet backgrounds. Fig. 7 shows the country-wise comparison of language
spectra. Similarly to Figs. 1-2, the comparison is performed within two groups: (a) countries
with comparable population numbers (Argentina, Spain, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Poland) and (b)
countries that share a common border with Ukraine (Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia).
Although the dominant share of A&H publications in Scopus is in English, the important role
of other languages, especially local national languages, can be seen in Fig. 7. It is
interesting to note that the share of publications in English for Ukrainian data is more similar
to neighboring countries. More variations are observed when considering countries of similar
size. This may serve as another hint about the factors that impact publication patterns in
A&H.
The results of a more granular analysis of Ukrainian publications at the level of
subcategories of A&H are presented in Fig. 8. One can see that documents in English
prevail in each subcategory of A&H, except for the subcategory Literature and Literary
Theory, where the majority of publications are non-English.
Figure 7. The distribution of A&H publications in different languages (English, the official
national language, another most used language, and the rest) for several countries: (a)
Ukraine and countries with similar population sizes (Argentina, Spain, Iraq, Uzbekistan,
Poland); (b) Ukraine and neighboring countries (Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia) that
share a common border. The total sum of shares may exceed 100% due to the language
detection peculiarities in Scopus, where multiple languages can be attributed to a single
document.
Figure 8. The distribution of Ukrainian A&H publications across various disciplinary
subcategories, categorized by language (English vs. non-English).
To speculate on the correlations between language usage and the scholarly impact, FWCI
values were calculated for English vs. non-English publications within A&H subcategories.
According to these numbers, the citation impact of English publications is more than twice as
large as publications in other languages for the majority of subcategories. The corresponding
values of FWCI for the TOP5 most represented subcategories are as follows:
● History: i.e., FWCI = 1.07 for publications in English vs FWCI = 0.4 for publications in
other languages;
● General Arts and Humanities: 0.97 vs 0.5;
● Language and Linguistics: 0.55 vs 0.23;
● Philosophy: 1.32 vs 0.3;
● Archaeology (Arts and Humanities): 0.65 vs 0.25.
In general, the citation impact for all non-English Ukrainian A&H publications, regardless of
the disciplinary subcategory, is significantly below the global average.
5. Discussion
Our study reveals the main bibliometric characteristics of Ukrainian A&H publications
between 2012 and 2021 as observed through the Scopus database. According to our
findings, the visibility of Ukrainian A&H in this context is higher compared to some Asian
countries with comparable populations. However, Ukrainian output is smaller when
compared to other countries of a similar ‘caliber’ in terms of population. While the country’s
size is considered an important factor shaping publication activity in A&H, our results
indicate that the absolute annual publication rates are closer for countries with more similar
geopolitical positions, specifically those that share common borders with Ukraine, in our
case. We speculate about the importance of cultural and historical similarities.
The observed increase in annual numbers of outputs is a characteristic of A&H not only for
Ukraine: similar patterns are observed for Poland, Argentina, and China. Along with the
global growth of scientific literature (Bornmann et al., 2021), the expansion of the A&H
segment is also found for Ukraine. This feature of Ukrainian scholarly output is not exotic,
either. Of course, the explanations may differ for different countries. The increase in the
absolute number of Ukrainian scholarly publications is accompanied by an increase in the
relative share of A&H and the number of sources. In our belief, these tendencies are caused
by a gradual evolution of publication practices and scholarly communication in general, as
well as changes in the rules of rewarding in the research sphere. The expanding share of
journal publications versus books can be considered as a side-effect of a desire to have
more publications covered by international databases (Abramo et al., 2023). The coverage
of non-English language books in Scopus is poor (Giménez-Toledo et al., 2017). Special
attention to journal articles from national research evaluations can also lead to changes in
publishing practices, as has already been found for other countries (Hammarfelt and
Haddow, 2018; Kulczycki et al., 2018).
The topical spectrum of Ukrainian A&H is studied: History is found to be the most
represented subcategory of the field by the total number of publications (as well as the total
number of unique authors and citations) in Scopus. The most-related disciplinary area is
found to be Social Sciences: the majority of A&H publications are co-attributed to it, but this
holds only for works published by 1–5 authors – the most typical size of co-authorship
teams. Such a natural connection between A&H is confirmed also by the disciplinary
distribution of citing works. However, when interpreting these results, it should also be
remembered that different approaches to the disciplinary classification of papers can affect
bibliometric analysis, which is confirmed by the results of other studies (Arhiliuc and Guns,
2023; Guns et al., 2018).
In the course of data, several interesting nuances with publication metadata were noticed.
For example, the source-wise method of subject categorization of records applied in Scopus
resulted in the proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Advanced Computer
Information Technologies (ACIT 2020) being included in the Arts and Humanities category.
Hypothetically, only four contributions labeled as “Information Technologies in Historical
Science” led to this categorization of the ACIT proceedings. As a consequence, 139
publications primarily related to Computer Sciences were automatically included in the
Ukrainian A&H output for 2020. Despite the small sample size (which is not uncommon for
A&H in Scopus or WoS), it was sufficient to make ACIT 2020 one of the most influential
sources in 2020. Additionally, a distortion in the typical co-authorship pattern was observed,
with an overrepresentation of publications co-authored by 5 or more authors. The expected
number of publications for different sizes of co-authorship teams was determined using a
random sampling technique. Other noteworthy outliers were the two reports from large
collaborations mentioned earlier (EC FP7 Projects and RESET project), which were
incorrectly labeled as regular articles.
One of the most important aspects of our results is the conclusion about the low integrity of
Ukrainian A&H in the global scholarly information system. This conclusion can be drawn
from different factors. Firstly, Ukrainian authors in A&H tend to publish their results in
Ukrainian journals, which are often targeted at local audiences (10 out of the TOP20 most
used sources are published in Ukraine, and for 7 of them, over half of both publications and
citing documents are related exclusively to Ukrainian authors). Secondly, other sources most
used by Ukrainian humanitarians are published in neighboring countries. Here, the strong
influence of the Soviet past has to be taken into account: there is a long-standing tradition of
publishing in Russian editions, and the Russian language is still widely used in Ukraine
(although it is not the official language in Ukraine, it is the second most used language in
Ukrainian A&H visible in Scopus; the largest number of collaborative works are published in
co-authorship with Russian authors). Since 2014 publications in Russian journals are not
encouraged due to the first stage of the Russian-Ukrainian war, but at least 4 out of the
TOP20 most used sources, while not officially attributed to Russia, are largely targeted at
Russian audiences according to both the shares of publications and citing publications
related exclusively to Russian authors. Therefore, one can conclude that (i) the strong
dependency on the Russian expert environment is still preserved in Ukrainian A&H and (ii)
the internationalization of the field is formal in the sense that the results are published in
sources with a narrow audience, and the majority of published results remain uncited, while
the rest are usually cited less than expected, especially for non-English publications. The
annual shares of papers in the highest-quartile journals have decreased, with the lowest
numbers characterizing the output for 2020 and 2021.
Despite the contentious nature of utilizing citations as a means of evaluating research,
recent scholarly investigations indicate a discernible association between research quality
and citation metrics, even within the realm of humanities (Thelwall et al., 2023).
Consequently, the increasing number of Ukrainian A&H outputs in Scopus, coupled with the
decreasing number of highly-influential source titles and poor citedness, may be considered
as hidden signals about the wrong motivation of authors. Rather than prioritizing the best
platform to disseminate their results, the main priority seems to have shifted towards the
formal status of journals, such as indexing in Scopus, which does not necessarily imply
influence or global visibility by default. This aligns with the conclusions of a previous study,
which primarily focused on journals in the natural sciences: “…the practice used to reward
scientists and institutions in Ukraine probably does not encourage Ukrainian scientists to
seek the optimal channel for the presentation of their research outputs. Instead, most
Ukrainian scientists are trying to quickly publish as many papers as possible” (Nazarovets,
2020). However, additional research, including authors interviews, is required to convincingly
prove this claim.
To improve the visibility and impact of the work of Ukrainian scientists, it is recommended to
conduct a complete audit and reform of the national system of scientific assessment in
Ukraine, taking into account the best practices of other countries (Lewandowska et al., 2022;
Pedersen et al., 2020; Pölönen et al., 2021). In the process of evaluating authors and
institutions working in A&H, Ukraine should abandon the simplistic use of quantitative
indicators, or at least significantly reduce their weight in favor of independent expert
assessment, following current trends in research evaluation (CoARA, 2022; Hatch and
Curry, 2020; Hicks et al., 2015; Wilsdon et al., 2015). The updated Ukrainian system should
consider the specifics of A&H, including the various channels for disseminating humanitarian
knowledge and the use of different languages for publishing scientific results.
Additionally, we suspect that the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war, which began in February
2022, and the reaction of the Ukrainian and global community to this invasion (Nazarovets
and Teixeira da Silva, 2022; Van Noorden, 2023), will impact the structure of co-authorship
and the language preferences of Ukrainian authors in the A&H fields.
6. Conclusions
The results of the analysis of Ukrainian A&H publications for 2012-2021 allow us to draw the
following conclusions.
Firstly, we found that the absolute annual number of Ukrainian A&H papers has increased,
accompanied by an increase in the number of published sources. While country size is an
important factor in shaping publication activity in A&H, our results indicate that countries with
geopolitical proximity to Ukraine tend to have similar annual publication rates, suggesting the
influence of cultural and historical similarities.
Another interesting result is related to the topical spectrum of Ukrainian A&H: History
appears to be the most represented subcategory in terms of total publications, unique
authors, and citations.
An important aspect of our findings is the low integration of Ukrainian A&H into the global
scholarly information system: Ukrainian A&H authors tend to publish their results in local
journals targeting domestic audiences. Additionally, Ukrainian A&H continues to exhibit
substantial reliance on the Russian expert environment.
One limitation of this study is that we only considered quantitative citation rates and did not
analyze the sources of these citations, such as the presence of unethical manipulations that
can significantly distort the overall results due to relatively small statistics. Citations to
publications in the sources discontinued from Scopus due to violations of publishing ethics
are also not distinguished here.
To obtain a more complete picture of the publishing activity of Ukrainian authors in the field
of A&H, it is necessary to significantly expand the source base of the bibliometric analysis,
particularly by adding more non-English-language local sources. In many countries,
comprehensive bibliographic data can be obtained from national CRIS systems (Zhang and
Sivertsen, 2020), but such a national system has not been developed for Ukraine thus far.
Data availability
The search results of the literature in Scopus underlying the bibliometric analysis are
available as an open source set of Supplementary files at Zenodo
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7682823.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all Ukrainian defenders for the possibility to finalize and
publish this work.
Competing interests
The authors do not have any competing interests.
Authors’ contributions
The authors contributed equally to all aspects of the paper.
Funding statement
No funding was received by either author for this research.
Notes
1. https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus/how-scopus-works/content. The latest update –
January 2023.
2. https://www.scimagojr.com/
3. January 2023
4. According to https://www.worlddata.info/developing-countries.php Accessed in February
2023
5. if the annual statistics is too poor to build a TOP20 rating, all sources with at least two
papers are taken into account
6. no international collaboration is allowed, unlike in the original paper (Moed, 2020)
7. the data for this particular table were retrieved in January 2023
8. according to https://www.scimagojr.com/
9. Scopus search query: SUBJAREA (arts) AND PUBYEAR < 2022 AND PUBYEAR > 2011
AND (LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE, "ar") OR LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE, "re") OR LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE,
"no") OR LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE, "ed") OR LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE, "le") OR LIMIT-TO
(DOCTYPE, "sh"))
10. Scopus search query: SUBJAREA (arts) AND PUBYEAR < 2022 AND PUBYEAR >
2011 AND (LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE, "ch") OR LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE, "bk"))
11. the same list of countries as in Figures 1 and 2 was used for comparison
12. The Ocean of Tomorrow” Project CoCoNet funded by the EU's research funding program
between 2007 and 2013, see
https://ec.europa.eu/search/index.do?QueryText=7th+Framework+Programme+%28FP7%2
9&op=Search&swlang=en
13. The RESET project (RESponse of humans to abrupt Environmental Transitions), a
program of research funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (UK) between
2008 and 2013
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