A Citation Study of the Characteristics of the Linguistics Literature

Abstract

By analyzing the citation patterns of the linguistics literature, the authors provide a bibliometric description of the discipline that will help librarians who have reference, instruction, or collection development responsibilities in this area understand it better. One important aspect of such an understanding is determining where linguistics classifies within the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences. Based on several of the citation patterns discovered, namely the importance of recent publications to the field, and the prominence of journals as a primary vehicle of scholarly communication, this analysis concludes that linguistics more closely resembles the disciplines of the social sciences.

Scholarly communication and authorship patterns in language research: evidences from citation analysis of language theses in Nigeria

“…Another study by Nkiko and Adetoro (2007) examined timeliness of cited sources and found out that more than 60% of citations were less than ten years old. Georgas and Cullars (2005), in their study, also found that the ages of citations were between one and fifteen years, and more than 5% of the citations were published between 1600 and 1960, which suggests that old materials were fairly cited.…”

“…This controversy about its classification may have contributed to a very scanty study on the citation patterns of the linguists and literary scholars as has been reported by Karisson (1994) and Georgas and Cullars (2005). Karisson contends that humanities in general have not been favoured by citation analysis, but linguistics is one of the lowest of the humanities disciplines.…”

“…Tannen (1989) has argued that linguistics (the science and study of languages) can be "scientific, humanistic and aesthetic" and therefore has been regarded as "the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences." Though Zwaan and Nederhof (1990) in their investigation concluded that theoretical linguistics reflects a publication pattern closer to the social sciences than the literary and historical studies, linguistics generally has been classified in the humanities (Georgas & Cullars, 2005, Knieval & Kellsey, 2005. Some linguists for example are historians of languages; others work quite closely with philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists and literary artists.…”

“…An investigation (Georgas & Cullars, 2005) using Language and Linguistics Behavioural Abstracts (LLBA) and MLA bibliography indicates that the linguistics citation patterns relate to social sciences, with 49.7% citations to books and 42.8% to journal. This is contrary to humanities citations which range from 60% to 80% citations to books and monographs.…”

“…However, the channel of communication and pattern of citations may be quite different from other fields. Channels of scholarly communication are usually through the journals, books, conference proceedings and later through online platform such as institutional repositories, blogs, social media among others (Heinzkill, 1980;Zwaan & Nederhof, 1990;Georgas & Cullars, 2005) which is typical of all humanities fields. Their reliance on books and monographs is so deep that it is doubtful whether there are core journals in languages.…”