Quantifying Interdisciplinary History: The Record of (Nearly) Fifty Years

Abstract

From its very beginnings, the JIH published articles that embraced quantitative methods, but in its effort to engage as many disciplines as possible, it did much more. Over the nearly fifty years of its publishing history, it has continued to publish variegated interdisciplinary material and, in the process, to present leading-edge research. Within the last ten years, however, the journal has acquired a new role in a much more international context. The emergence of new quantitative methods has permitted the JIH to redefine interdisciplinarity. Immense data sets, with modes of interpretation drawn from the social sciences as well as from the humanities, natural sciences, and medicine, will certainly continue to revolutionize future research in history and cognate disciplines.