Bibliometrics for Arts & Humanities

[David Goodman]

Another rough method is the use of Google Scholar. It includes citations to and from books as well as 
journals--but what it includes is erratic and unpredictable. The book citations are from the material in Google 
Books--including not just the out-of-copyright material but what later material is available, including  current 
material for the publishers that participate. the journal material is whatever is available on the part of the 
web they scan. There is also miscellaneous material from various academic web sites. 

If they were complete--or even if they said what they cover--the information would be more usable. In its 
present state, I would be loth to make more than the roughest comparisons--certainly not if someone's 
career was dependent on it, orthe fate of an academic department. But nonetheless it can prove informative 
if the items found are carefully examined and sorted by someone knowledgeable in the subject literature, 
and not just counted. 

There is one other more traditional measure--to examine whether there are book reviews of books in the 
standard bibliographic tools, such as Book Review Index and Book Review Digest. Within a subject, and for 
the sam type of book, the number of reviews has some connection with the importance. I wouldn't want to 
say anything more exact than that, but at least the coverage of these bibliographic databases is known and 
predictable. 

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
previously:
Bibliographer and Research Librarian
Princeton University Library

dgoodman at princeton.edu


----- Original Message -----
From: Stephen J Bensman <notsjb at LSU.EDU>
Date: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 9:41 am
Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] Bibliometrics for Arts & Humanities
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU

> 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 
> 76523251, 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
> 
> 
>