A bibliometric study of productivity and impact of modern language and literature research

A bibliometric evaluation was made of research performance in modern language and linguistics research. Separate analyses were made for language and linguistics and for literature components of each language in the study. The study covered both publications directed at a national or international scholarly output and publications destined for the general public. The latter accounted. for 8-73% of the output, and were particularly important in literature output. Publication and citation behavior differed considerably between language and linguistics on the one hand and literature on the other hand, calling for a tailored design of monitoring studies in both fields. In publications directed at scholars, the national language did not dominate. In literature fields, the language of the object of study was most important, while in language and linguistics, the object language was not always more important than English. The study indicates that both journal articles and book output need to be included in bibliometric evaluation. Citation impact analysis is shown to be informative in bibliometric assessment in this field, especially when a five-year citation window is used.