NWB2023_Locally oriented, globally visible? Geographic orientation of social sciences and humanities

Several disciplines in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) are characterized by a high degree of local language use, coupled with comparatively less international visibility (e.g., greater usage of local journals). This is, according to the most common explanation, because of their orientation toward a local or national context: if research is mainly relevant for a particular country or region, it makes sense to publish its results in the local language and in local venues. In this contribution, we empirically test this explanation by analysing the geographic orientation of publications in the comprehensive VABB database of Flemish SSH publications. To this end, we extract geographic words or phrases in titles and abstracts of English- and Dutch-language publications (Dutch being the local language used in Flanders). We apply geocoding and named entity recognition (NER) with geotext and spaCy. According to our preliminary analysis, about 30% of abstracts of SSH publications mention a country, city, or state. In the next step, we will relate the geographic orientation of publication contents to publication characteristics like language, author nationality, field, and journal ‘internationality’. All in all, we expect the results to contribute to a better understanding of disciplinary differences regarding language use and (inter)national orientation. These insights may in turn help to attune research (assessment) policies to the specifics of the SSH.