ARTS AND HUMANITIES LITERATURE: BIBLIOMETRIC ... AL - Arts and humanities literature 3 areâ€‌ and gives

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  • AL - Arts and humanities literature … 1

    ARTS AND HUMANITIES LITERATURE: BIBLIOMETRIC CHARACTERISTICS OF CONTRIBUTIONS BY TURKISH AUTHORS

    Umut Al,* Mustafa Şahiner** and Yaşar Tonta*

    Corresponding author: Y. Tonta Hacettepe University

    Department of Information Management 06532 Beytepe, Ankara, Turkey

    90 312 297 82 04 (voice) 90 312 299 20 14 (fax) tonta@hacettepe.edu.tr

    * Hacettepe University, Department of Information Management, 06532, Ankara, Turkey. E-mail: {umutal, tonta}@hacettepe.edu.tr. ** Hacettepe University, Department of English Language and Literature, 06532, Ankara, Turkey. E-mail: msahiner@hacettepe.edu.tr.

  • AL - Arts and humanities literature … 2

    ARTS AND HUMANITIES LITERATURE: BIBLIOMETRIC

    CHARACTERISTICS OF CONTRIBUTIONS BY TURKISH AUTHORS

    Abstract

    Scholarly communication in arts and humanities differs from that in the sciences. Arts and

    humanities scholars rely primarily on monographs as a medium of publication whereas

    scientists consider articles that appear in scholarly journals as the single most important

    publication outlet. The number of journal citation studies in arts and humanities is therefore

    limited. In this paper we investigate the bibliometric characteristics of 507 arts and humanities

    journal articles written by authors affiliated with Turkish institutions and indexed in the Arts &

    Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) between the years 1975-2003. Journal articles constituted

    more than 60% of all publications. One-third of all contributions were published during the last

    four years (1999-2003) and appeared in 16 different journals. An overwhelming majority of

    contributions (91%) were written in English and 83% of them had single authorship.

    Researchers based at Turkish universities produced 90% of all publications. Two-thirds of

    references in publications were to monographs. The median age of all references was 12

    years. Eighty percent of publications authored by Turkish arts and humanities scholars were

    not cited at all while the remaining 20% (or 99 publications) were cited 304 times (an average of

    three citations per publication). Self-citation ratio was 31%. Two-thirds of the cited publications

    got cited for the first time within two years of their publications.

    1. Introduction

    Garfield (1980a) points out that research and scholarly communication in sciences differ in

    many respects from that in the arts and humanities. “In contrast to scientists’ study of the

    physical universe, humanists are concerned with those human achievements which make up

    our cultural heritage. The works of art, religion, and philosophy which comprise this legacy are

    not superseded as scientific works are.” (p. 42, italics are original). Humanistic scholarship is

    “cumulative and least susceptible to obsolescence” (Stern, 1983, p. 205). Garfield (1980a, p.

    43) notes that “…humanities scholars are less compulsive about the literature than scientists

  • AL - Arts and humanities literature … 3

    are” and gives an example: If a scientist discovered, say, the structure of DNA, and published

    an article about it, there is nothing other scientists can do about it whereas if a music scholar

    published a monograph on Bach, “you do not burn your manuscript. You know that no one

    (including yourself) will ever be able to say the last word about Bach and his music” (p. 43). He

    also notes that arts and humanities scholars prefer books over journal articles as medium of

    publication and that “the citation tradition in the humanities is not as strong as it is in the

    sciences. An art historian may not formally cite such works as Guernica or the Mona Lisa. A

    literary critic would not cite Shakespeare everytime he mentions Hamlet” (p. 44).

    Garfield has first envisioned the use of citations listed in the bibliographies of articles to

    make connections between citing and cited works and later founded the Institute for Scientific

    Information (ISI, now Thomson Scientific) which has been publishing the well-known and widely

    used Science Citation Index (SCI), the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts &

    Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) since then. Citation indexes list documents that have been

    cited and the sources of these citations. Citation indexes are also useful for information

    retrieval and literature search. They can help researchers find relevant publications, keep up-

    to-date with relevant research, and eliminate the duplication of prior research. They are also

    used to evaluate the productivity of researchers, institutions or nations and the relative

    importance of works in question by providing various citation statistics (journal impact factors,

    immediacy index, obsolescence rates, and so on). In line with the increasing number of

    publications, SCI covers over 5900 science and technical journals while SSCI lists the contents

    of 1700 social sciences journals today. The A&HCI, which forms the basis of this study, covers

    over 1130 leading arts and humanities journals representing the fields of literature, art,

    architecture, archaeology, music, religion, classics, philosophy, history, dance, folklore, film, TV,

    radio, linguistics, philology, and theater (ISI, 2004a; Garfield 1980a, p. 44; İnönü, 2003).

    Garfield (1980a) describes in detail how they developed A&HCI for the arts and

    humanities scholars, its indexing principles, and the difference between A&HCI and other

    citation indexes. A&HCI indexes not only the journal articles but also “reviews of books, theater,

    opera, music and dance performances, recordings, and arts shows….editorials, interviews,

    discussions, notes, letters, bibliographies, chronologies, corrections, errata, original poetry,

    short stories, essays, plays, and book excerpts” (p. 45). It “also covers individually selected,

  • AL - Arts and humanities literature … 4

    relevant items from over 7,000 science and social sciences journals” since 1979 (ISI, 2004b;

    Garfield, 1980a, p. 45).

    The citation indexing of arts and humanities publications is somewhat different from that

    of sciences and social sciences. As such publications may contain reproductions of paintings or

    music scores, or mention novels and dance performances, without actually formally citing those

    works, they are treated by ISI indexers as “implicit” citations and indexed accordingly (Garfield,

    1980a, p. 47). When a citing article includes a work of art, a portion of a musical score, or

    contains an implicit citation not listed in its bibliography or footnotes, A&HCI displays the

    abbreviations of “ILL”, “MUS” and “IMP”, respectively, as the cited volume (ISI, 2004c, Stern,

    1983, p. 200). ISI indexers also add new terms (in parentheses) to the original source titles

    “that clarify, add meaning or supply search access points that would otherwise not exist.” Such

    “title enhancements,” as they are called, are a unique feature of A&HCI (ISI, 2004d).

    2. Literature Review

    The availability of ISI’s citation indexes made it possible to carry out a wide range of bibliometric

    and scientometric studies based on bibliometric characteristics of publications and references

    therein. Some of these works deal with scientific productivities of countries (Haiqi & Yuhua

    1997; İnönü & Kurnaz 2002; Jacobs & Ingwersen 2000; Moed 2002; Moed, De Bruin & Van

    Leeuwen 1995; Ortiz-Rivera, Sanz Casado & Suárez-Balseiro 2000; Osareh & Wilson 2000;

    Uzun & Özel 1996; Wilson & Osareh 2003). Others make comparisons between countries in

    terms of their contributions to the world’s overall scientific productivity (Braun, Glänzel & Grupp

    1995a, 1995b; Garfield 1983). The great majority of citation analysis studies concentrate on

    scholarly articles that appear in science and social science journals whereas relatively fewer

    citation studies are carried out in arts and humanities. The main reason for this is that different

    scientific disciplines have somewhat different scholarly communication modes and that citations

    serve different functions.

    Arts and humanities scholars “prefer to work alone, and … do their research on their

    own” (Buchwald, 1999). They publish books predominantly, whereas books as a medium of

    scholarly communication are neglected by scientists (Hicks, 2004, p. 474). Hicks (2004)

    reviewed the bibliometric studies of social sciences and humanities and found that scholars in

  • AL - Arts and humanities literature … 5

    these disciplines publish in four distinct literatures (journal articles, books, national literatures,

    and non-scholarly literature), each serving a different purpose. As Hicks suggests, the citation

    behaviors of scientists, social scientists and arts and humanities scholars are also different. “In

    the humanities, referencing is archival (de Solla Price, 1970) and citation counts accumulate at
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