The structure of the Arts & Humanities Citation Index: A mapping on the basis of aggregated citations among 1,157 journals

Abstract

Using the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) 2008, we apply mapping techniques previously developed for mapping journal structures in the Science and Social Sciences Citation Indices. Citation relations among the 110,718 records were aggregated at the level of 1,157 journals specific to the A&HCI, and the journal structures are questioned on whether a cognitive structure can be reconstructed and visualized. Both cosine-normalization (bottom up) and factor analysis (top down) suggest a division into approximately 12 subsets. The relations among these subsets are explored using various visualization techniques. However, we were not able to retrieve this structure using the Institute for Scientific Information Subject Categories, including the 25 categories that are specific to the A&HCI. We discuss options for validation such as against the categories of the Humanities Indicators of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the panel structure of the European Reference Index for the Humanities, and compare our results with the curriculum organization of the Humanities Section of the College of Letters and Sciences of the University of California at Los Angeles as an example of institutional organization.

Edited volumes, monographs and book chapters in the Book Citation Index (BKCI) and Science Citation Index (SCI, SoSCI, A&HCI)

“…Mathematics and Sociology, however, are also indicated on the map. Note that the overlay-map technique does not include the A&HCI (Leydesdorff et al, 2011). Figure 4 shows the distribution for WoS SCs that were attributed 500 or more times to 'Book chapters.'…”

“…'Psychology' is the second largest group in SSH with 336 chapters 1 . 'Linguistics,' which can be considered as the most formalized discipline among the humanities (Leydesdorff et al, 2011) follows with only 17 chapters.…”

The Core Literature of the Historians of Venice

“…As much as the mapping of the sciences is a well-developed area of research (Börner, 2010), the humanities are often omitted or sidelined (Klavans and Boyack, 2009): "[their] fine-structures […] have been black-boxed and insufficiently unpacked; the available studies focused mainly on their positions relative to the social and natural sciences. " (Leydesdorff et al, 2011). In the early decades of bibliometrics, the humanities have been the object of general descriptive citation studies (Hérubel, 1994).…”

“…The authors found that both journals cite mostly within the span of their original domain, but are cited widely outside of it, while for comparison a small set of articles in the digital humanities was found to cite widely but being only cited by a narrower community, resembling the sciences with respect to its "being-cited patterns." Leydesdorff et al (2011) provided the largest attempt to date to map all the humanities using the whole A&HI dataset for the year 2008. Perhaps the most salient finding is a coherent set of twelve dimensions (latent factors) clearly organized in more or less proximal areas of research, among which we find classics, religion, and archeology; linguistics and the history and philosophy of science; literature and history; arts; music.…”

Visualization and analysis of SCImago Journal & Country Rank structure via journal clustering

“…Rafols and Leydesdorff (2009) carried out a comparative analysis of four classification systems: two generated by indexers -that is, content-based-and two by means of automatic clustering algorithms decomposing the aggregated JCR journal-journal citation matrix. Next, Leydesdorff et al (2011) applied the algorithm k-core to represent 25 specific categories in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index to then integrate the generated representation on a previously developed global map of science (Rafols et al, 2010). Leydesdorff and Rafols (2012) took a citation matrix consisting of 9,162 journals from the Science Citation Index Expanded of 2009 and developed interactive maps.…”