Harvesting footnotes in a rural field: citation patterns in Swedish literary studies

Hammarfelt, Björn

doi:10.1108/00220411211239101

Cited by 22 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Yet one of the main features of the humanities is their reliance on monographs, which still are the main publication channel in most humanities disciplines (Thompson, 2002;Knievel and Kellsey, 2005;Larivière et al, 2006;Williams et al, 2009), and specifically in historiography (Jones et al, 1972). As a consequence, the most cited literature in any field within the humanities should essentially include monographs (Hicks, 1999), indeed the conclusion reached by some previous studies (Lindholm-Romantschuk and Warner, 1996;Hammarfelt, 2011Hammarfelt, , 2012, even if others struggled to find a set of core works in specific fields (McCain, 1987;Thompson, 2002;Nolen and Richardson, 2016). The contrasting results provided by previous literature are motivated by a set of considerations, which relate to the citation patterns of the humanities more in general.…”

Section: Monographs and The Core Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

The Core Literature of the Historians of Venice

Colavizza

2017

Front. Digit. Humanit.

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Over the past decades, the humanities have been accumulating a growing body of literature at an increasing pace. How does this impact their traditional organization into disciplines and fields of research therein? This article considers history, by examining a citation network among recent monographs on the history of Venice. The resulting network is almost connected, clusters of monographs are identifiable according to specific disciplinary areas (history, history of architecture, and history of arts) or periods of time (middle ages, early modern, and modern history), and a map of the recent trends in the field is sketched. Most notably a set of highly cited works emerges as the core literature of the historians of Venice. This core literature comprises a mix of primary sources, works of reference, and scholarly monographs and is important in keeping the field connected: monographs usually cite a combination of few core and a variety of less well-cited works. Core primary sources and works of reference never age, while core scholarly monographs are replaced at a very slow rate by new ones. The reliance of new publications on the core literature is slowly rising over time, as the field gets increasingly more varied.

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Section: Monographs and The Core Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

The Core Literature of the Historians of Venice

Colavizza

2017

Front. Digit. Humanit.

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“…The influence of English-language sources is moderate: Less than 15 % of the cited sources in German literature and only 9 % of the cited sources in French literature are in English (Cullars 1989). Swedish literary studies has a higher percentage of citations of English-language sources (between 43 and 54 %), but Swedish as well as German and French sources are frequently cited (Hammarfelt 2012b). Consequently, studies of these fields must incorporate non-English sources, and the same applies to many other countries and research fields.…”

Section: The Language and Age Of Cited Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When targeting specific contexts-Catalan literature (Ardanuy et al 2009) or Swedish literary studies (Hammarfelt 2012b)-this method might be viable. The building of 'ad hoc databases' allows analyses of materials that usually are not indexed in citation indices such as grant applications (Hammarfelt 2012b), and small local studies can provide valuable contrast to larger studies of citation patterns. However, the amount of labor involved in harvesting references by hand and then indexing them in a database inherently limits the size of the datasets used.…”

Section: Ad Hoc Databasesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Examples of such attempts include the use of non-source items in established citation databases such as Web of Science (Hammarfelt 2011;Linmans 2010), the use of alternative databases like Google Scholar (Kousha and Thelwall 2009;Koshua et al 2011) and the recent exploration of the possibilities that the new Book Citation Index offer (Gorraiz et al 2013;Leydesdorff and Felt 2012). These efforts include exploration of local databases (Engels et al 2012), references in grant applications (Hammarfelt 2012b), book reviews (Zuccala and van Leeuwen 2011) as well as inclusion in library catalogues (White et al 2009). Recently, the possibilities that altmetrics offer for the humanities have also been investigated (Hammarfelt 2014;Holmberg and Thelwall 2013;Mohammadi and Thelwall 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Beyond Coverage: Toward a Bibliometrics for the Humanities

Hammarfelt

2016

Research Assessment in the Humanities

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In this chapter, the possibility of using bibliometric measures for evaluating research in the humanities is pondered. A review of recent attempts to develop bibliometric methods for studying the humanities shows that organizational, epistemological differences as well as distinct research practices in research fields ought to be considered. The dependence on colleagues, interdisciplinarity and the 'rural' nature of research in many humanistic disciplines are identified as factors that influence the possibilities of applying bibliometric methods. A few particularly promising approaches are highlighted, and the possibility of developing a 'bibliometrics for the humanities' is examined. Finally, the intellectual characteristics of specific disciplines should be considered when quality indicators are constructed, and the importance of including scholars from the humanities in the process is stressed.

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“…However, Hammarfelt (2016: 115) observes a shift from investigating coverage issues towards studying the characteristics of SSH publication practices and developing bibliometric approaches sensitive to the organization of SSH research fields. This includes, but is not limited to, extending bibliometric analyses to non-source items (Butler and Visser, 2006;Chi, 2014) or the relatively new Book Citation Index (Gorraiz et al, 2013), using other databases like Google Scholar (Kousha and Thelwall, 2009) or data from social media services, the so-called altmetrics (Holmberg and Thelwall, 2014;Mohammadi and Thelwall, 2014;Zuccala et al, 2015;Zuccala and Cornacchia, 2016), analysing the inclusion in library catalogues (White et al, 2009), exploring national databases with full coverage , extending data to references in research grant proposals (Hammarfelt, 2013) or to book reviews (Zuccala and van Leeuwen, 2011;Zuccala et al, 2015), exploring collaboration (Ossenblok and Engels, 2015) and publication patterns (Chi, 2012;Ossenblok et al, 2012;Verleysen and Weeren, 2016). From a more pragmatic point of view, attempts are made to "weigh" the various outputs, such as journals or books in the SSH, similar to the journal impact factor, commonly used in the sciences (Giménez-Toledo, 2016).…”

Section: Improving the Databasesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The future of research assessment in the humanities: bottom-up assessment procedures

2017

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Research assessment in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) is delicate. Assessment procedures meet strong criticisms from SSH scholars and bibliometric research shows that the methods that are usually applied are ill-adapted to SSH research. While until recently research on assessment in the SSH disciplines focused on the deficiencies of the current assessment methods, we present some European initiatives that take a bottom-up approach. They focus on research practices in SSH and reflect on how to assess SSH research with its own approaches instead of applying and adjusting the methods developed for and in the natural and life sciences. This is an important development because we can learn from previous evaluation exercises that whenever scholars felt that assessment procedures were imposed in a top-down manner without proper adjustments to SSH research, it resulted in boycotts or resistance. Applying adequate evaluation methods not only helps foster a better valorization of SSH research within the research community, among policymakers and colleagues from the natural sciences, but it will also help society to better understand SSH's contributions to solving major societal challenges. Therefore, taking the time to encourage bottom-up evaluation initiatives should result in being able to better confront the main challenges facing modern society. This article is published as part of a collection on the future of research assessment.

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Harvesting footnotes in a rural field: citation patterns in Swedish literary studies

Cited by 22 publications

References 35 publications

The Core Literature of the Historians of Venice

The Core Literature of the Historians of Venice

Beyond Coverage: Toward a Bibliometrics for the Humanities

The future of research assessment in the humanities: bottom-up assessment procedures

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