The social sciences and their publishers: Publication, reception and changing meaning of German monographs

Books are an important part of scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). A number of developments affecting both the SSH and their publishers seem to have shifted the relative importance and prestige of the various publication types in favour of the English journal article and to the detriment of books. While these developments have been studied quite extensively in other countries, empirical analyses of German SSH publishing are still rare. This paper attempts to narrow this gap by investigating publication and citation patterns of German social science monographs since the 1980s against the backdrop of changes in SSH communication and publishing. Using a comprehensive bibliographic dataset for the social sciences in Germany and corresponding citation data, it addresses the question of the relevance of scholarly monographs today.