Bibliometric analysis of isi's Arts & Humanities Citation index

Abstract

Bibliometrics, the quantitative study of literature, has made a considerable contribution to the management of scientific libraries and to the understanding of the sociology of science. It has joined operations research as effective management tools in making substantial impact on optimization of library services, resources sharing and allocation in library networks. With the common belief that humanistic literatures are different, these analytic techniques have not been applied to any extent. We believe that although sociological factors may impact on the humanities in different ways, patterns of regularity in communication, individual contribution, and literature growth shall be studied. Knowledge of the characteristics of humanistic literatures may enable us to improve information access and to maximize available resources in space, manpower, and funds for books. A pilot study has been attempted on a bibliography of the history of the American Revolution.The data base is constructed from the Writings on American History: A Subject Bibliography of Articles under the heading "Revolution & Confederation (1763-1789)". To facilitate the analysis, the data management program FAMULUS was used. Selected Results : 1095 articles were published between 1962-1976 by 790 authors in 224 journals or publishing sources. The average author productivity is 1.39 which is similar to other fields studied. As expected, a few highly prolific authors dominated the field, and their productivity distribution follows the well-known Lotka's Law. The dispersion of publications over journals also adheres to Bradford's distribution, identifying the most productive journal in this field as the William and Mary Quarterly . Thus, scholarship in general assumes certain common characteristics regardless of the discipline. Yet differences exist. There are only 77 (10%) authors who have ever co-authored in a mere 47 (4%) of the total literature. This is a dramatic departure from the intensely collaborative enterprise of science in which almost all scientific writers co-author.From our experience, FAMULUS is a useful tool in bibliometric analysis in addition to being a good personal documentation system to replace our shoebox of cards. We have also used it in the teaching of indexing and retrieval of documents.