Publishing across disciplines: A comparison of organizational and cognitive classification in the social sciences and humanities

<div>The VABB-SHW is a comprehensive database of Flemish SSH publications, in which publications are assigned to disciplines based on the departmental affiliation of the authors. This organizational classification stands in opposition to a cognitive classification, in which a publication (channel) is classified according to its contents (Daraio & Glänzel, 2016).</div><div>In this presentation we explore the differences between the organizational VABB classification and a cognitive classification based on the OECD Fields of Science (FOS). Since VABB disciplines and FOS disciplines are mostly aligned, we can determine which publications have a non-matching VABB and FOS discipline. We refer to these as ‘outside own field’ (OOF) publications.</div><div>Our results show that OOF publications are a relatively common phenomenon, but that large disciplinary differences exist. While 70% of journal contributions in the humanities are published in humanities journals, this is the case for only 53% of publications from the social sciences. The share of OOF publications is highest for communication studies and lowest for law. The comparison of different kinds of classifications provides a new way of characterizing disciplines as well as knowledge exchanges between adjacent disciplines. </div><div><br></div><div><b>References</b></div><div><br></div><div>Daraio, C., & Glänzel, W. (2016). Grand challenges in data integration—state of the art and future perspectives: an introduction. Scientometrics, 108(1), 391–400.</div><div><br>