Citation Mining of Humanities Journals: The Progress to Date and the Challenges Ahead

Abstract

Even large citation indexes such as the Web of Science, Scopus or Google Scholar cover only a small fraction of the literature in the humanities. This coverage sensibly decreases going backwards in time. Citation mining of humanities publications — defined as an instance of bibliometric data mining and as a means to the end of building comprehensive citation indexes — remains an open problem. In this contribution we discuss the results of two recent projects in this area: Cited Loci and Linked Books. The former focused on the domain of classics, using journal articles in JSTOR as a corpus; the latter considered the historiography on Venice and a novel corpus of journals and monographs. Both projects attempted to mine citations of all kinds — abbreviated and not, to all types of sources, including primary sources — and considered a wide time span (19th to 21st century). We first discuss the current state of research in citation mining of humanities publications. We then present the various steps involved into this process, from corpus selection to data publication, discussing the peculiarities of the humanities. The approaches taken by the two projects are compared, allowing us to highlight disciplinary differences and commonalities, as well as shared challenges between historiography and classics on this respect. The resulting picture portrays humanities citation mining as a field with a great, yet mostly untapped potential, and a few still open challenges. The potential lies in using citations as a means to interconnect digitized collections at a large scale, by making explicit the linking function of bibliographic citations. As for the open challenges, a key issue is the existing need for an integrated metadata infrastructure and an appropriate legal framework to facilitate citation mining in the humanities.

Cross-lingual citations in English papers: a large-scale analysis of prevalence, usage, and impact

“…As for (1), both S2ORC and the PMC OAS link references in their papers to document IDs within the data set itself (only partly in the PMC OAS, where also MEDLINE IDs and DOIs are found [13]). This is problematic in our case, because S2ORC is restricted to English papers, and the PMC OAS is constrained to Latin script contents, 9 which means metadata on non-English cited documents is non-existent (S2ORC) or very limited (PMC OAS). In unarXive, on the other hand, references are linked to the MAG, which contains metadata on publications regardless of language.…”

“…As such analyses and applications require data to be based on, the availability of citation data or lack thereof is decisive with regard to the areas, in which respective insights can be gained and approaches developed. Here, the literature points in two major directions of lacking coverage-namely the humanities [9,24] and non-English publications [30,36,38,46]. Because most large scholarly data sets are either artificially limited to few languages (e.g., English only) or do not provide language metadata, a particular practice not well researched so far is cross-lingual citation.…”

The OpenCitations Data Model

“…The Venice Scholar Index (VSI) 14 is an instance of the Scholar Index, originated from the "Linked Books" project [8] founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The citation index includes about 4 million references to publications cited in the historiography of Venice.…”

The OpenCitations Data Model

“…The Venice Scholar Index (VSI) 21 is an instance of the Scholar Index, originated from the Linked Books project [8] founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The citation index includes about 4 million references to publica-tions cited in the historiography of Venice.…”

“…In recent years, largely thanks to the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) 8 , most major scholarly publishers have made their bibliographic reference data open, resulting, for example, in more than 700 million citations now being made openly available in COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations [17]. As a consequence, scholarly database providers and bibliometric analysis software have started to integrate open citation data in their services, thereby offering an alternative to the current reliance on proprietary citation indexes.…”