Library Catalog Analysis and Library Holdings Counts: origins, methodological issues and application to the field of Informetrics

Unrevised version to be published in "Evaluative informetrics – the art of metrics based research assessment. Festschrift in honour of Henk F. Moed" , edited by Cinzia Daraio and Wolfgang Glänzel.In 2009, Torres-Salinas & Moed proposed the use of library catalogs to analyze the impact and dissemination of academic books in different ways. Library Catalog Analysis (LCA) can be defined as the application of bibliometric techniques to a set of online library catalogs in order to describe quantitatively a scientific-scholarly field on the basis of published book titles. The aim of the present chapter is to conduct an in-depth analysis of major scientific contributions since the birth of LCA in order to determine the state of the art of this research topic. Hence, our specific objectives are: 1) to discuss the original purposes of library holdings 2) to present correlations between library holdings and altmetrics indicators and interpret their feasible meanings 3) to analyze the principal sources of information 4) to use WorldCat Identities to identify the principal authors and works in the field of Informetrics

Preprint w humanistyce – fikcja czy realna możliwość?

Even though the use of open preprint databases for scholarly publications is commonplace in several disciplines, their possibilities remain largely unexplored in the humanities. This article examines the emergence and the dynamics of academic preprint and evaluates the possibilities for introducing preprint for the humanities.Pomimo że korzystanie z otwartych baz preprintów publikacji naukowych jest powszechne w wielu dyscyplinach, możliwości takich baz preprintów pozostają w dużej mierze niewykorzystane w naukach humanistycznych. Artykuł omawia powstawanie i dynamikę preprintu akademickiego oraz ocenia możliwości wprowadzenia preprintów w naukach humanistycznych

A diachronic study of historiography

The humanities are often characterized by sociologists as having a low mutual dependence among scholars and high task uncertainty. According to Fuchs' theory of scientific change, this leads over time to intellectual and social fragmentation, as new scholarship accumulates in the absence of shared unifying theories. We consider here a set of specialisms in the discipline of history and measure the connectivity properties of their bibliographic coupling networks over time, in order to assess whether fragmentation is indeed occurring. We construct networks using both reference overlap and textual similarity. It is shown that the connectivity of reference overlap networks is gradually and steadily declining over time, whilst that of textual similarity networks is stable. Author bibliographic coupling networks also show signs of a decline in connectivity, in the absence of an increasing propensity for collaborations. We speculate that, despite the gradual weakening of ties among historians as mapped by references, new scholarship might be continually integrated through shared vocabularies and narratives. This would support our belief that citations are but one kind of bibliometric data to consider --- perhaps even of secondary importance --- when studying the humanities, while text should play a more prominent role

The References of References: Enriching Library Catalogs via Domain-Specific Reference Mining

The advent of large-scale citation services has greatly impacted the retrieval of scientific information for several domains of research. The Humanities have largely remained outside of this shift despite their increasing reliance on digital means for information seeking. Given that publications in the Humanities probably have a longer than average life-span, mainly due to the importance of monographs in the field, we propose to use domain-specific reference monographs to bootstrap the enrichment of library catalogs with citation data. We exemplify our approach using a corpus of reference monographs on the history of Venice and extracting the network of publications they refer to. Preliminary results show that on average only 7% of extracted references are made to publications already within such corpus, therefore suggesting that reference monographs are effective hubs for the retrieval of further resources within the domain