Publication Patterns Analysis of the Humanities and Social Sciences in The Top 50 Countries in Comparison with the Total Publications of These Countries on the Web of Science Database

The purpose of the present study is to analyze the publication       patterns of the humanities and social sciences domain (HSSD) in the top 50 leading countries in comparison with their total publications at the Web of    Science (WoS) during the years of 1990-2017.

This study was conducted by scientometrics approach. Data were collected from WoS and entered into Excel software and analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistics.

The findings showed that out of 48329064 publications in 50 under-studied countries, 8517586 records (17.62%) have been published in the HSSD. The average growth rate of publication for the 50 countries in all disciplines was about 37% and in the HSSD it was about 45%. In all scientific disciplines, the Iranian publications’ growth rate was 117%, which is 3.16 times larger than the average global growth rate. Also, the investigation of growth rate in the HSSD showed that China is at the top with 103%, while Iran with 100 % and Indonesia with 98% ranked second and third respectively.

The humanities and social sciences publications in the 50% of under-studied countries is lower than publications of Pure Science, this shows the need for serious attention of these countries to HSSD researches.