What to Include in a Social Sciences and Humanities Citation Index - an Empirical Analysis

A well-designed and comprehensive citation index for the social sciences and humanities has many potential uses, but has yet to be realised. Significant parts of the scholarly production in these areas are not published in international journals, but in national scholarly journals, in book chapters or in monographs. In this paper we investigate the potential for covering these literatures empirically by using a complete publication output data set from the higher education sector of an entire country (Norway). We find that the so far uncovered literatures are concentrated in relatively few publication channels, which should be promising for a more comprehensive coverage of the social sciences and humanities.