Bibliometrics for Arts & Humanities

Wed Sep 19 09:58:28 EDT 2007

Howard,

I see once again that great minds tend to think alike.  A bibliometric
justification for using library holdings as a quality measure is
provided by Urquhart's Law.  This law forms the operating basis of the
British Library Document Supply Centre, and I consider it the most
important law of library science per se.  Simply stated, Urquhart's Law
posits that the more libraries in a given system that hold a given
bibliographic item, the more this given bibliographic item is not only
used internally in these libraries (intralibrary use) but the more these
libraries borrow this item from each other either through interlibrary
loan or document delivery (supralibrary use).  Urquhart developed his
law in respect to scientific journals, but he held that it should also
be applicable to monographs, and in this I think that he was right.
Basing myself on Urquhart's Law, I have demonstrated that library
holdings are significantly correlated not only to supralibrary use but
also to total citations, expert ratings, and number of times titles are
indexed.  If you are interested in Urquhart's Law, then go to the Web
site below and read the attachment.  These are my major writings on
Urquhart's Law.

http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/bensman/bensman.html

As an aside, the same sociological role of publishing elite writings,
which is played by the associations in science and social science
journals, appears to be played in monographs by the presses of the elite
universities such Chicago, Harvard, MIT, California, Oxford, Cambridge,
etc. etc.  I think that if you would check scholarly monographs
published by these university presses against those published by
commercial presses, you would find former's library holdings much higher
than the latter's.  

Stephen J. Bensman

LSU Libraries

Louisiana State University

Baton Rouge, LA   70803

USA

notsjb at lsu.edu

________________________________

From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics
[mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU] On Behalf Of Howard White
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 11:55 AM
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] Bibliometrics for Arts & Humanities

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:

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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