Following academic globalization, successful integration into the international research community is a fundamental interest for all participating countries. The success of these internationalization processes, however, are often under scrutiny, and the results are rarely unequivocal. This holds true for Central and Eastern Europe, which usually is described as a semiperipheral region of global knowledge production. Analyzing the publication and citation indices of 365 Hungarian social scientists in one national (Hungarian Scientific Bibliography) and two global (Scopus, Google Scholar) databases, we explicate the current international impact of Hungarian academic research while exploring pivotal factors behind the major differences between databases. Our results indicate that Hungarian scholars lag behind their peers in neighboring countries, necessitating effective policy measures. To this end, the analysis recommends the use of standardized global publication databases instead of national datasets, while still acknowledging the shortcomings of the latter in research assessment protocols.