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The structural role of the core literature in history

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Abstract

The intellectual landscapes of the humanities are mostly uncharted territory. Little is known on the ways published research of humanist scholars defines areas of intellectual activity. An open question relates to the structural role of core literature: highly cited sources, naturally playing a disproportionate role in the definition of intellectual landscapes. We introduce four indicators in order to map the structural role played by core sources into connecting different areas of the intellectual landscape of citing publications (i.e. communities in the bibliographic coupling network). All indicators factor out the influence of degree distributions by internalizing a null configuration model. By considering several datasets focused on history, we show that two distinct structural actions are performed by the core literature: a global one, by connecting otherwise separated communities in the landscape, or a local one, by rising connectivity within communities. In our study, the global action is mainly performed by small sets of scholarly monographs, reference works and primary sources, while the rest of the core, and especially most journal articles, acts mostly locally.

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Notes

  1. Analyses relied on igraph [0.7.1] (Csardi and Nepusz 2006) and Vincent Traag’s community detection library [0.5.3] available at https://github.com/vtraag/louvain-igraph.

  2. See http://wiki.cns.iu.edu/display/CISHELL/Detect+Duplicate+Nodes, accessed May 2017.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank, in alphabetical order: Martina Babetto, Silvia Ferronato and Matteo Romanello (EPFL), colleagues who helped with the collection and processing of the Venetian dataset. The Library of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice willingly collaborated with bibliographical resources and logistics support. The Central Institute for the Union Catalogue of Italian Libraries and Bibliographic Information (ICCU) shared its catalog metadata with us. I thank both for their support. I would also like to thank Ludo Waltman and Vincent Traag (CWTS Leiden), and Massimo Franceschet (University of Udine) for very helpful advice. I worked in part on this research project during a research stay at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, where I had the opportunity to present and discuss my work with great benefits. I would finally like to thank CWTS for providing access to its databases.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Digital Humanities Laboratory, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Station 14, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Giovanni Colavizza

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  1. Giovanni Colavizza
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Correspondence to Giovanni Colavizza.

Additional information

This research is funded by the Swiss National Fund with Grants 205121_159961 and P1ELP2_168489.

Appendix

Appendix

See the Tables 5, 6 and 7.

Table 5 Top-five core sources per indicator: Monographs history Venice
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Table 6 Top-five core sources per indicator: The Library 1981–2016
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Table 7 Top-five core sources per indicator: All History 2005–2015
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Colavizza, G. The structural role of the core literature in history. Scientometrics 113, 1787–1809 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2550-4

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