JOURNAL OF SCIENTOMETRIC RESEARCH, vol.3, no.3, pp.143-149, 2014 (ESCI)
This study investigates bibliometric characteristics of publications on sign languages indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Science Citation Index between 1900 and 2013, and arts and humanities citation index between 1975 and 2013 in web of science (WoS). There were 2460 scientific publications on sign languages from a variety of research areas written in 14 languages with authors from 66 countries. 95.24% of them were written in English while 49.71 % of authors were from the USA. Although the first publication appeared in 1902, the number of publications has recently increased: 86.26% of them were covered in WoS between 1990 and 2013. A majority of the publications were on American Sign Language and British Sign Language, with 63.46% and 9.33% of all publications, respectively. The number of sign language publications will continue to increase in WoS, covering a wider variety of sign languages.