Arts and Humanities and the others: Why can’t we measure arts and humanities

Zehra Taşkın,Güleda Doğan

doi:10.1051/itmconf/20203302003

Zehra Taşkın, Güleda Doğan

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1051/itmconf/20203302003

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Abstract

The use of numbers (publications and citations) to evaluate research/er performances are widespread since ease of use. However, disciplinary differences must be considered to evaluate research/ers accurately without misjudgments in tenures and incentives. The most different filed from others in terms of publications and citation patterns is Arts & Humanities. The main aim of this study is to reveal the main differences between Arts & Humanities and the other fields by considering publications, citations, and collaboration. For this aim, the main statistics for 59,728,700 papers published between 1980-2018 are gathered from InCites in terms of the 251 Web of Science subject categories. The data confirmed that Arts & Humanities is considerably different from other fields. We showed the degree of these differences using statistical measures. The huge difference found out that underline the indispensability for evaluating Arts & Humanities separately from the others.

Highlights

For the last couple of decades, policy-makers and managers try to find solutions for measuring research performance
Many studies in the literature reveal the characteristics of the field [1,2,3,4,5]. All these works assert that while co-authorship is common in positive sciences, researchers in the arts and humanities prefer to work alone
For ex., English papers indexed in A&HCI is 72% while it is 94-95% for SSCI and SCIE

Summary

Introduction

For the last couple of decades, policy-makers and managers try to find solutions for measuring research performance. After the foundation of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and citation indexes in 1960, policy-makers and managers have preferred to use the numbers (publications and citations) to evaluate research/er performances since ease of use. Many studies in the literature reveal the characteristics of the field [1,2,3,4,5] All these works assert that while co-authorship is common in positive sciences, researchers in the arts and humanities prefer to work alone. This study aims to reveal the main differences between Arts & Humanities and the other fields by considering the number of publications and citations, percent of documents cited, percent of highly cited papers, percent of collaboration with industry and internationally, and percent of open access publications. Along with the aim of this study, the research questions addressed are as below:

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