Bibliometrics for Arts & Humanities

Tue Sep 18 12:55:24 EDT 2007

Dear Members,

I was surprised and delighted to see Stephen Bensman's posting  
because in August
I delivered a series of talks in Sydney and Brisbane Australia in  
which I advocated
precisely the same measure—library holdings counts in WorldCat and,  
in their case,
Libraries Australia—as a way of assessing the research contributions  
of academics
in the arts and humanities.  My talks were related to evaluating  
academics under the
new Research Quality Framework, which is scheduled to begin in  
Australia in 2008.
(RQF resembles the Research Assessment Exercise of the UK.)  Australian
academics in the arts, humanities, and softer social sciences are  
under a double
whammy as far as the Thomson Scientific databases are concerned:  not  
only are
the journals of their fields much less well covered, the journals of  
their nation are also
much less well covered.  Linda Butler of Australian National  
University has been
working on RQF-related measures involving citations to books (as  
opposed to
journal articles) in the Thomson databases, but even these miss much  
of the whole
picture, as she herself points out.

I am currently teaming with some researchers from the Bibliometric  
and Informetric
Research Group at the University of New South Wales (Connie Wilson,  
Mari Davis,
and others) to work on the proposed holdings-count measure for "book- 
oriented"
researchers Down Under.  (It was in indirect connection with this  
project that I posted
the notice about Anne-Wil Harzing's Publish or Perish software last  
week.)  The
larger bibliometrics community has pretty much ignored holdings  
counts and OCLC.
In 1995 I published a whole book about them, Brief Tests of  
Collection Strength, and I
have a long article about them coming out in College & Research  
Libraries in the
first half of 2008.  These works focus on their uses in library  
collection evaluation,
but it has long been evident to me that they can also be used to  
evaluate authors—
after all, OCLC's list of the top 1000 items by holdings counts reads  
like a Who's Who
of authors in the Western intellectual tradition.  So does a list of  
the most widely held
items in LibraryThing, the Web tool for cataloging personal  
collections, although
there the top authors are virtually all novelists, poets, and  
playwrights.  In any case
it is high time bibliometricians started paying attention to holdings- 
count data as a
complement to citation data.

Howard D. White, Professor Emeritus
College of Information Science and Technology
Drexel University
Philadelphia, PA 19104

On Sep 18, 2007, at 9:28 AM, Stephen J Bensman wrote:

> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe): http:// 
> web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
> 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
>
> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>
> 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
>
> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
> 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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