References to Archival Materials in Scholarly History Monographs

Abstract

Citation analysis, or the counting of the number of times specific resources are cited in scholarly publications, is a common tool in library and information sciences and has been in practice for around a century. This form of analysis is popular because it provides metric-based feedback about use of documents. But it has rarely been used to investigate use of archival material.I have attempted to adapt citation analysis to the examination of archival collection and repository use. In my study, I have set out to look at citations of archival material in a sample of 136 recently published, single-authored books (or monographs) produced by highly cited university presses in the United States and made available as e-books and categorized according to subject by Project Muse. The intended goal is to examine the feasibility of using citation analysis to discover patterns in scholarly user reportage of archival use. Factors studied include the percentage of monographs that cite archival material; variations in number of formats (physical or digital) and repositories referenced; and whether specific historical subjects are more likely to follow distinct usage patterns.It should be noted that unlike a strictly defined "citation study," which counts each time a source is cited, this is a "reference study," which counts each archival collection only once per book, even if it is cited multiple times.

Library Impact Research Report: Impact of Archival Collections and Services on the Western University Department of History

“…The study found that "68 percent of the titles referenced at least one archival collection, that archival collections housed at universities were used more often than other types of repositories, and that the amount and type of repositories did not in most cases vary based on the subject matter of the book." 42 Ewalt used citation analysis in her 2016 study to examine the use of archival visual resources in American history scholarship. Her data showed that scholars used visual archival resources as crucial historical evidence.…”