The structural role of the core literature in history

Abstract

The intellectual landscapes of the humanities are mostly uncharted territory. Little is known on the ways published research of humanist scholars defines areas of intellectual activity. An open question relates to the structural role of core literature: highly cited sources, naturally playing a disproportionate role in the definition of intellectual landscapes. We introduce four indicators in order to map the structural role played by core sources into connecting different areas of the intellectual landscape of citing publications (i.e. communities in the bibliographic coupling network). All indicators factor out the influence of degree distributions by internalizing a null configuration model. By considering several datasets focused on history, we show that two distinct structural actions are performed by the core literature: a global one, by connecting otherwise separated communities in the landscape, or a local one, by rising connectivity within communities. In our study, the global action is mainly performed by small sets of scholarly monographs, reference works and primary sources, while the rest of the core, and especially most journal articles, acts mostly locally.

Science and its significant other: Representing the humanities in bibliometric scholarship

“…Lastly, recent work by Colavizza (, ) aimed to study the role of core sources in cognitive networks in history. He shows, using a newly developed database of publications, including monographs of the history of Venice, that various types of core sources play different roles in the cognitive structure of history.…”

“…We are in particular interested in the ways the social and cognitive structures and publication practices of the humanities have been studied throughout the history of bibliometrics, often in comparison to other scientific domains or to a general notion of “the sciences.” Earlier reviews of bibliometric literature pertaining to the humanities exist (Ardanuy, 2013; Huang & Chang, ; Nederhof, 2006; part 2.3 in Moed, 2006), but have been predominantly related to research evaluation. Previous reviews ask which bibliometric indicators are suitable to use for evaluative purposes in the humanities (and social sciences; exceptions being Colavizza, ; Hammarfelt, 2016).…”

“…Earlier reviews of bibliometric literature pertaining to the humanities exist (Ardanuy, 2013;Huang & Chang, 2008;Nederhof, 2006;part 2.3 in Moed, 2006), but have been predominantly related to research evaluation. Previous reviews ask which bibliometric indicators are suitable to use for evaluative purposes in the humanities (and social sciences; exceptions being Colavizza, 2017a;Hammarfelt, 2016).…”

A diachronic study of historiography

“…These considerations in part motivate why, so far, "the study of the intellectual structure within the humanities using citation analysis is as yet an underdeveloped area" of research [Hammarfelt, 2011]. Recent work highlighted some commonalities to be found in the literature on the topic [Colavizza, 2017]:…”