[Retrospective citation index in humanities : the idea, methodology, applications] This paper describes methodology of citation index building, acquired by converting bibliographical database. This idea has been applied to Citation Index of the Historiography of Polish Media (Indeks Cytowań Historiografii Mediów Polskich [ICHMP]) that contains 24627 documents linked by 63811 citations. The biggest advantage of this method is its high effectiveness. The database has achieved coefficients similar to Thomson ISI indexes, e.g. citation impact’ was 6.7, maximum citation number per publication was 415, and the top-ranking author has acquired 1075 citations. The article describes particular stages of creating such a database and their critical evaluation. Following stages have been described: system design, database construction methodology, conversion and using converted dat
