Bibliometrics for Arts & Humanities

Wed Sep 19 02:48:03 EDT 2007

Dear collleagues, 

One can measure the impact of humanities scholars on the social sciences
because the non-ISI sources are processed in the Journals Citation Reports.
For those of you who read these messages in html I reprint below the
cosine-normalized result of "HABERMAS PUBLIC SPHE" as a source item using
2005 data:

Best wishes, 

Loet
  _____  

Loet Leydesdorff 
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam
Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-20- 525 3681 
 <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net> loet at leydesdorff.net ;
<http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ 

Now available:
<http://www.universal-publishers.com/book.php?method=ISBN&book=1581129378>
The Knowledge-Based Economy: Modeled, Measured, Simulated. 385 pp.; US$
18.95 
 <http://www.universal-publishers.com/book.php?method=ISBN&book=1581126956>
The Self-Organization of the Knowledge-Based Society;
<http://www.universal-publishers.com/book.php?method=ISBN&book=1581126816>
The Challenge of Scientometrics

  _____  

From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics
[mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU] On Behalf Of Howard White
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 6:55 PM
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] Bibliometrics for Arts & Humanities

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:

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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