The case for the Humanities Citation Index (HuCI): a citation index by the humanities, for the humanities

Abstract

Citation indexes are by now part of the research infrastructure in use by most scientists: a necessary tool in order to cope with the increasing amounts of scientific literature being published. Commercial citation indexes are designed for the sciences and have uneven coverage and unsatisfactory characteristics for humanities scholars, while no comprehensive citation index is published by a public organisation. We argue that an open citation index for the humanities is desirable, for four reasons: it would greatly improve and accelerate the retrieval of sources, it would offer a way to interlink collections across repositories (such as archives and libraries), it would foster the adoption of metadata standards and best practices by all stakeholders (including publishers) and it would contribute research data to fields such as bibliometrics and science studies. We also suggest that the citation index should be informed by a set of requirements relevant to the humanities. We discuss four such requirements: source coverage must be comprehensive, including books and citations to primary sources; there needs to be chronological depth, as scholarship in the humanities remains relevant over time; the index should be collection driven, leveraging the accumulated thematic collections of specialised research libraries; and it should be rich in context in order to allow for the qualification of each citation, for example, by providing citation excerpts. We detail the fit-for-purpose research infrastructure which can make the Humanities Citation Index a reality. Ultimately, we argue that a citation index for the humanities can be created by humanists, via a collaborative, distributed and open effort.