Coverage and Overlap of the New Social Sciences and Humanities Journal Lists

This is a study of coverage and overlap in second-generation social sciences and humanities journal lists, with attention paid to curation and the judgment of scholarliness. We identify four factors underpinning coverage shortfalls: journal language, country, publisher size, and age. Analyzing these factors turns our attention to the process of assessing a journal as scholarly, which is a necessary foundation for every list of scholarly journals. Although scholarliness should be a quality inherent in the journal, coverage falls short because groups assessing scholarliness have different perspectives on the social sciences and humanities literature. That the four factors shape perspectives on the literature points to a deeper problem of fragmentation within the scholarly community. We propose reducing this fragmentation as the best method to reduce coverage shortfalls.