In recent decades governments have sought greater accountability from those who receive public money. In this environment, universities have faced changing funding regimes with the introduction of national systems of funding conditional on evaluation of research output, or performance based research funding systems. Universities in many countries now face periodic measurement and comparison of their research output. They participate in a single national system used to evaluate research across all types of universities and all fields. Such systems are designed to best suit the most expensive and most powerful universities and fields. Others will need to adapt to better fit the evaluation protocol. In OECD countries, the natural sciences and engineering account for 70-80% of government research spending on higher education. These are the most expensive and powerful fields, thus evaluation assumptions and protocols are designed for them. Social sciences must adapt. Since research evaluation rests largely on consideration of publication output – both quantity and impact – it is the form of social science scholarly publication that is evolving in response to the imposition of national research evaluation. At the same time, governments have accepted the argument that a one size fits all research evaluation system is unfair, and research evaluation protocols have been revised to better suit social science and humanities scholarship. Research evaluation and publishing in the social sciences and humanities are co-evolving.