Bibliometrics for Arts & Humanities

[Stephen J Bensman]

In general, the humanities have not been found amenable to bibliometric analysis.  Not only has ISI-Thomson Scientific not developed a JCR for the  AHCI despite an initial intent to do so, but publication and citation counts have not been utilized for the humanities by agencies like the American Council on Education and the National Research Council charged with evaluating the quality of US research-doctorate programs.  These agencies have relied upon measures such as peer ratings and number of faculty awards.  In general, humanities frequency distributions do not have the same highly skewed character as those in the sciences and social sciences, indicating the causal factors of variance are less strong.
 
If you are looking for a quantitative humanities measure, I would suggest using the number of libraries holding a given item that is easily available in OCLC WorldCat.  It is a substitute measure for subjective judgments of librarians and faculty on the importance of a given bibliographic item.  I have advised humanities faculty to use this measure for journals, and they have told me that it matches their intuitive sense of the importance of journals, and it can be used to judge the importance of monographs--more important in the humanities.  You can judge the importance of books written by persons in the humanities, and it can be used to rate the faculty of given programs.  Another such measure would the number of times books are reviewed in journals widely held by libraries.  One problem with WorldCat library counts is that they are dominated US holdings, but then so are Thomson Scientific publication and citation counts as well as everything else in this world.
 
I hope that you find this of some help.
 
Respectfully,
Stephen J. Benman
LSU Libraries
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA
USA 

________________________________

From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics on behalf of Chiner Arias, Alejandro
Sent: Tue 9/18/2007 5:51 AM
To: SIGMETRICS at listserv.utk.edu
Subject: [SIGMETRICS] Bibliometrics for Arts & Humanities




Having failed to find a bibliometric tool for Arts & Humanities, I am
asking to this list in the hope somebody here will know something
similar to Journal Citation Reports.

I am aware of the Arts & Humanities Citation Index as a bibliographic
database, but the JCR only use Science and Social Sciences data from the
respective Thompson ISI bibliographic databases.

My second question is about ranking of cited academics.  Again the ISI
Higly Cited database applies only to Science and some of the Social
Sciences.  Is there something similar for the Humanities?
http://isihighlycited.com/

Many thanks for any leads.  I am aware of the software below thanks to
that posting. 

Alec
___________________________________
Alejandro Chiner, Service Innovation Officer,
University of Warwick Library Research & Innovation Unit,
Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom. Tel: +(44/0) 24 765
23251, Fax: +(44/0) 24 765 24211,
a.chiner-arias at warwick.ac.uk http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/riu
___________________________________

-----Original Message-----
From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics
[mailto:SIGMETRICS at listserv.utk.edu] On Behalf Of Howard White
Sent: 12 September 2007 21:26
To: SIGMETRICS at listserv.utk.edu
Subject: [SIGMETRICS] New Version of Publish or Perish

Dear Members,

Anne-Wil Harzing of University of Melbourne has asked me to
announce on this list that Version 2.3 of her Publish or Perish
software has been released.  As many of you know, PoP is an
interface to Google Scholar that radically simplifies the gathering
of citation data from the Web.  For author analysis it provides:



*       Total number of papers
*       Total number of citations
*       Average number of citations per paper
*       Average number of citations per author
*       Average number of papers per author
*       Average number of citations per year
*       Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
*       Egghe's g-index
*       The contemporary h-index
*       The age-weighted citation rate
*       Two variations of individual h-indices
*       An analysis of the number of authors per paper.

It also has modules for analyzing contributors to a journal and
contributors to a subject literature as defined by the user. 

Several papers discussing its features are downloadable as well.
For details, go to:

http://www.harzing.com/resources.htm#/pop.htm

Howard D. White


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