The social sciences: who won the '90s in scholarly book publishing

The study of prizes awarded to books in the 1990s by leading social sciences scholarly associations helps us understand the disciplines, publishing, and libraries during that decade. This article examines data on prizewinners of the American Anthropological Association, the American Educational Research Association, the Association of American Geographers, the American Political Science Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Sociological Association. For the prizewinners, it reports the distribution of winners among publishers and universities; the extent of cross-disciplinary publishing; the degree of coauthorship; trends in library acquisitions of print versions; and accessibility of electronic versions. The University of Chicago Press ranked first among publishers, and the faculty at Harvard won more prizes than did faculty at any other institution. Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal classifications assigned to the winners show substantial cross-disciplinary interest. Sixteen percent of the books were coauthored. Library print holdings appeared to decline over the decade by approximately 20 percent and in April 2004, 19 percent of prizewinners were available electronically.