Human Rights Research and Publication Trends

The Danish Institute for Human Rights Research Department reports that over the summer, a team reviewed the abstracts of 1906 articles published in 17 international human rights journals from 2011-2017 in order to explore research and publication trends.  The journals covered were European Human Rights Law Review, Harvard Human Rights Law Review, Human Rights Law Review, Human Rights Quarterly, The Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, Nordic Journal of Human Rights, The International Journal of Human Rights, International Journal of Children Rights, Journal of Human Rights, Journal of Human Rights Practice, Humanity – an International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Sur – International Journal of Human Rights, Northwestern Journal of Human Rights, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Yale Human Rights&Development Law Journal, Buffalo Human Rights Law Review, Howard Human and Civil Rights Law Review.

Here are the results:

According to the DIHR research department newsletter, “The above diagram presents respectively the four most and the least popular subjects in the articles reviewed. Nine journals were based in the US and eight in Europe. By far the majority of journals strive to include a broad range of disciplines and subjects in their publication policy. Three journals announced a focus on human rights law specifically. One subject posed a particular problem: the rights of the child. This was due to the fact that one journal, International Journal of Children Rights, is exclusively devoted to the subject. If this journal is included in the review, child rights range second in the subjects covered. If the journal is excluded, child rights is covered in 3.9% of 1727 articles. If an article covered several subjects, for instance a regional entity like Asia and a thematic subject, it was classified under each subject category, but with a limit of three different categories.

. . . . The table does not include the International Journal of Children Rights. An important caveat is that human rights topics will also be covered in international journals that are not directly focused on human rights as well as in domestic journals.

Three further remarks: Civil and political rights and Economic, social and cultural rights articles accounted for 8.9% of the articles Human rights and development articles accounted for 6.4% of the articles Theory, methodology, and meta research articles accounted for 5.8% of the articles.”