Citation studies in the humanities

Citation studiesin the humanitiesChris Alen SulaSchool of Information & Library SciencePratt Institute

#DH2013 / Citation studies in the humanities / @chrisalensula @thisismmiller

Matt Mil lerNYPL LabsNew York Public Library

Background‣ scholarly communication — the processes by which scholars

share their findings, both formally (e.g., articles) and informally (e.g., tweets, letters, blogs)

‣ bibliometrics — methods for analyzing citation behaviors


‣ Bibliometrics is largely based on studies of scientific and technical corpora (Hérubel and Buchanan, 1994; Lamont, 2000), with relatively few studies in the humanities (cf. Ardanuy, 2013).

(Yan & Ding, 2012)

Citation networks


Rosvall & Bergstrom (2007)

Bibliometrics & humanities: Why so l itt le?‣ lack of data (Linmans, 2010), especially for

‣ monographs (Hammarfelt, 2011), which still form the backbone of humanities work (Larivière, et. al., 2006)

‣ older sources, which humanists cite with greater frequency than scientists (Heinzkill, 1980)

‣ lack of citations, comparatively speaking

‣ Humanists cite each other less frequently than scientists (Heinzkill, 1980; Swales, 1990; Hellqvist, 2010).

‣ Multi-authored articles are rare (Price, 1966; Pao, 1981, 1982; Sievert and Sievert, 1989; Wiberly, 1989), around 1.06 authors per article from 1980–2007 (Linmans, 2010).

‣ Humanists do cite and co-author (Leydesdorff, Hammarfelt & Salah, 2011) and Dhers have done citation studies (Smith, 2009).


‣ Humanities discourse differs from scientific discourse.

‣ more integral references, in which authors associate their own views with those they references (Swales, 1990; Hyland, 1999; Harwood, 2008)

‣ more negative references, which object to other authors’ claims (Meadows, 1974; Brooks, 1985; Cano, 1989).

‣ The mere fact that one humanist cites another says nothing about type or significance of their relationship.

‣ Understanding and tracking these these relationships would give us a richer, more nuanced view of the humanities. Part of that data can come from reference contexts, part from extra-citational information (mentions, likes, real-world relationships, etc.).


Bibliometrics & humanities: Why so l itt le?

Reference context


(Chubin & Moitra, 1975)

(Frost, 1979)

‣ two example schema


Code at http://github.com/thisismattmiller/dh2013-humanities-citation

Our tool: extraction


‣ Layout recognition used to extract citations and surrounding context (usually 1–2 sentences)

Our tool: classif ication

‣ Naïve Bayes classifier using NLT


sample from positive training set‣extensively discussed by‣useful discussion‣indebted to‣groundbreaking work‣result confirms the hypothesis

sample from negative training set‣contra‣appears to overlook‣fail to account for‣problematic‣is unable to

Data & results


‣ articles sampled for this study

‣ results of citation tool applied to sample set

Polarity results by discipl ine


Broader patterns?‣ citation frequency x polarity


Future directions

‣ further manual inspection of articles to determine the reliability of extraction and classification

‣ further training of the sentiment classifier on larger corpora

‣ measures of inter-rater reliability for classification

‣ support for more document layouts

‣ crowdsourced PDF analysis & classif ier training


References‣ All references are available in the conference proceedings at

http://dh2013.unl.edu/abstracts/ab-353.html

‣ Additional references:

‣ Jordi Ardanuy (2013). "Sixty Years of Citation Analysis Studies in the Humanities (1951–2010)" Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 64(8): 1751–1755.

‣ Erjia Yan and Ying Ding (2012). “Scholarly Network Similarities: How Bibliographic Coupling Networks, Citation Networks, Cocitation Networks, Topical Networks, Coauthorship Networks, and Coword Networks Relate to Each Other” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63(7): 1313–1326.

‣ Code at http://github.com/thisismattmiller/dh2013-humanities-citation
