Publishing peer-reviewed articles in high-impact international journals bears immense significance, not only for advancing individual research careers but also for enhancing the global recognition and embeddedness of the domestic political science community. The more high-impact international journal articles are published by domestic researchers, the deeper the Hungarian political scientists can integrate into the international scholarly community. This may bring several advantages, including opportunities for international research collaborations, funding or grant applications, conference and workshop invitations. Therefore, we have analyzed the international journal publication performance of the Hungarian political scientists between 2019 and 2022, with a specific focus on the Institute for Political Science at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences (HUN-REN CSS IPS).

Figure 1: The distribution of publications in D1 journals (N = 67) published between 2019 and 2022 by authors’ affiliation

Based on the SCImago Journal Rankings (SJR), publications by IPS researchers have an outstanding share in the top categories. In Q1 journals, which belong to the top quartile of the journal rankings, 39 percent of the publications were authored by researchers affiliated with IPS. In the highest-ranked D1 journals, which represent the top 10 percent in the rankings, 55 percent of all the publications had an author affiliated with IPS (Figure 1). The share of publications authored by IPS researchers was significantly lower in the lowest-ranked (Q4) and non-ranked journals (Table 1).

IPS researchers contribute a significantly greater share to the most prestigious foreign-language international journal publications produced by Hungarian political scientists than their proportion in the domestic political science community. As a result, the IPS has reinforced its leading position in domestic political science, representing one of the key pillars of its international embeddedness and visibility. IPS researchers have contributed twice as much to foreign-language international journal publications than their share in the domestic political science community.

Table 1: The foreign-language international journal publications between 2019 and 2022 by authors’ affiliation and journal classification

Methodology

First, based on a triple institutional criterion, we determined who may belong to the domestic political science community. The list included those who, as of April 2023, i) either had an employment contract with HUN-REN CSS IPS, ii) were members of accredited Hungarian university departments or institutes with a political science profile, iii) or were members of the Committee on Political Science of the IX. Section of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. After filtering the overlaps, we identified 373 researchers whose international journal publication performance we measured based on the data recorded in the Hungarian Science Bibliography (MTMT). We aggregated the international publications of those 347 researchers who have an MTMT profile. Among them, 55 colleagues had an IPS affiliation (15.8 percent).

Relying on the MTMT database, we identified all the foreign-language international journal articles published between 2019 and 2022 with at least one author from the above-identified list of Hungarian political scientists. We considered only those foreign-language journal articles that were published abroad. Thus we excluded articles in Hungarian published abroad and foreign-language studies published in domestic journals. Over the four-year period, a total of 369 foreign-language international journal articles were authored by members of the domestic political science community. Among these, 121 journal articles had at least one author affiliated with the IPS, which represents one-third of all the publications (Table 1).