We present animations based on the aggregated journal-journal citations of
Leonardo during the period 1974-2008. Leonardo is mainly cited by journals
outside the arts domain for cultural reasons, for example, in neuropsychology
and physics. Articles in Leonardo itself cite a large number of journals, but
with a focus on the arts. Animations at this level of aggregation enable us to
show the history of the journal from a network perspective

Leydesdorff, Loet

Salah, Alkim Almila Akdag

English

arXiv

We present animations based on the aggregated journal-journal citations of Leonardo during the period 1974-2008. Leonardo is mainly cited by journals outside the arts domain for cultural reasons, for example, in neuropsychology and physics. Articles in Leonardo itself cite a large number of journals, but with a focus on the arts. Animations at this level of aggregation enable us to show the history of the journal from a network perspective

Utrecht University Repository

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE JOURNAL ENVIRONMENT OF LEONARDO  Alkim Almila Akdag Salah, Virtual Knowledge Studio of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cruquiusweg 31, 1019 AT Amsterdam, the Netherlands. E-mail: <alelma@ucla.edu> &  Loet Leydesdorff, Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), University of AmKloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam, the Netherlands. E-mail: <sterdam, loet@leydesdorff.net > Submitted: <leave for Editor to date> Abstract We present animations based on the aggregated journal-journal citations of Leonardo during the period 1974-2008. Leonardo is mainly cited by journals outside the arts domain for cultural rea-sons, for example, in neuropsychology and phys-ics. Articles in Leonardo itself cite a large number of journals, but with a focus on the arts. Animations at this level of aggregation enable us to show the history of the journal from a network perspective.  Scientometric indicators such as citations are increasingly used for the evaluation of performance [1]. In the arts and hu-manities, however, communication should not be considered primarily as a flow of information [2; cf. 3]. Nonethe-less, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) of the Institute of Scien-tific Information (ISI)—currently owned by Thomson Reuters—contains a rich source of statistical information about journals [4]. For example, this data al-lows us to study a journal’s development over time in terms of aggregated cross-journal citation relations.  While this mapping technique has been applied to journals in the domains of the sciences and social sciences, the ISI does not publish an aggregated Jour-nal Citations Report (JCR) for the A&HCI. In another context, we con-structed such an index [5] and focused on the journal Leonardo as a prime ex-ample of an art journal. We downloaded the bibliographic information for all articles published in Leonardo since its inception in 1968 and for all articles citing Leonardo during this whole pe-riod.  The citations can indicate the impact of Leonardo on other (groups of) jour-nals as proxies for fields of scholarly activity, whereas the references provided by the authors in Leonardo inform us about what these authors consider the relevant knowledge bases for their publi-cations. Since the retrieved documents did not contain citation information for the period 1970-1973, we limited the analysis to publications since 1974 (5,859 documents). These papers contain 31,147 cited references and were cited 1,680 times. Additionally, we use the 65,285 citations in the citing documents to position Leonardo in its citation im-pact environment. Based on co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling, respectively and for each consecutive year, we generated animations available online at http://www.leydesdorff.net/journals/leonardo/citing and http://www.leydesdorff.net/journals/leonardo/cited/. Results These animations locate Leonardo as an interdisciplinary journal connected to the sciences, social sciences, and the arts throughout the time span covered. The goal of Frank Malina, the founding Edi-tor of Leonardo, was to create a journal enabling artists to follow new develop-ments in the sciences. Editorials in the journal emphasized the interdisciplinary intention and orientation throughout the years in question [6]; our animations show this interdisciplinarity evolving over the years in both the journal’s refer-enced knowledge base (“citing”) and its (“cited”) impact environment.  The citation patterns are not dense and are therefore volatile from year to year. Figure 1 shows the results of the co-citations of 53 journals cited in 924 ref-erences from the 157 articles published in Leonardo during 2008. Figure 2 pro-vides the corresponding co-citation map using 107 articles which cited Leonardo in 2008.  Figure 1: 53 journals cited by 157 articles in Leonardo in 2008; no citation threshold within the set; cosine > 0.0. In the animation showing the journals cited by contributors to Leonardo, one can distinguish various art movements, among them Kinetic Art, Holographic Art, Cybernetic Art, Computer Art, and Space Art. In addition to art movements, journals from a wide range of scientific fields are cited—e.g., neurology, cogni-tive science, psychology, vision and computer graphics—as well as topics such as fractal geometry, applied mathematics, and applied optics. The journal Health Hazards is frequently cited, as it contains information about the use of different chemicals and tech-nological appliances in generating art-works.  Art journals form another important group in the animations of the citation patterns of Leonardo. This group is more or less equally divided among journals focusing on aesthetics, art theory, and contemporary art news. Upon closer inspection of the animations, one can see that theoretically oriented journals ap-pear more persistently in the animation based on articles citing Leonardo, while journals reporting on the latest state of the art market cite Leonardo more than they are cited in Leonardo’s publica-tions. Core journals of the arts and art history such as Art News, Studio Interna-tional, Art Forum, Art Bulletin, and Art Journal are consistently included.  Figure 2 shows an unexpected finding: among the journals which contain docu-ments citing Leonardo in 2008, only 24 contribute more than 0.5% to its being cited pattern, and these 24 journals are mainly in the domain of the sciences and the social sciences. Three journal groups are relevant in this citation impact environment: physics, neuroscience, and perception research. These three factors explain 53.8% of the variance. (The nodes are colored in accordance to their highest loadings in the Varimax-rotated three-factor solution.) Leonardo itself is positioned at the edge between the latter two specialties.  The presence of science journals in the impact environment of Leonardo is not stable over the years, but in all years science journals are visible in relatively large clusters. Among the science jour-nals citing Leonardo from year to year, Science, Nature, and Scientific American dominate the animation. Since the mid-80s another cluster contains journals with a focus on computer graphics. A third, relatively stable cluster is provided by journals in cognitive science that en-ter the picture at the beginning of the 1990s, with strong connections to a psy-chology cluster. Through studies on vi-sion and perception, journals in neuroscience, cognitive science, psy-chology, and computer graphics are re-lated to this citation environment. Since the turn of the century, Leo-nardo has increasingly lost citations from the art world in favor of citations from journals in the sciences. In 2008 (Figure 2), science journals dominate its citation impact environment. In earlier years, however, certain core-books by Gombrich [7], Arnheim [8, 9], and Goodman [10] were also cited heavily. These art historians are renowned for their interest in psychology and linguis-tics, and hence their presence as refer-ences in the citation networks strengthened Leonardo’s citation rela-tions with journals in these disciplines.  Generalization and Conclusions We repeated the analysis of Leonardo as a journal for Art Journal, a publication of the College Art Association. This journal publishes (since 1941) articles related to contemporary art, and in that sense its audience and constituency is akin to that of Leonardo. Like Leonardo, Art Journal is overwhelmingly cited outside the domain of the arts and the humanities. The journals in this larger environment range from physics to ad-vertising research, but most references are to “non-source” journals such as the NY Times, Newsweek, and the Washing-ton Post.  In other words, the impact of journals in the arts is not confined to the Arts & Humanities as scholarly discourses in journals, but reaches a much wider audi-ence including the sciences, the social sciences, and the wider public. These journals are cited primarily in the larger environment, perhaps not so much for intellectual as for cultural and instrumen-tal reasons. The predominant rationale of references to these journals is different from that which governs the sciences and the social sciences, where intellectual organization can explain the patterns of citation.  Figure 2: Cosine relations among 3,259 references in 107 articles citing Leonardo dur-ing 2008; only journals which contribute more than 0.5% to the total number of cita-tions; no citation threshold within the set; cosine > 0.0; colors of nodes correspond to the highest factor loadings in a Varimax-rotated three-factor solution.  Furthermore, the patterns of citations in the citing and cited dimensions are different for these art journals. Although they draw on a wider environment, it is possible to identify core groups among the journals in the A&HCI in terms of how the authors in these journals provide references when constructing their ar-guments. The citation impact of Leo-nardo on other art journals, however, has decreased over the years. Given this conclusion, one might in-deed be hesitant to assess journals and research covered by the A&HCI in terms of scientometric indicators which use field-specific parameters. These journals may occupy positions that are quite dif-ferent from the specialty structures typi-cal of the sciences and social sciences. Thus, the journals and the constituting articles can be evaluated also in terms of these wider cultural influences. Citation relations are organized not only on so-cio-cognitive grounds, but also on the basis of cultural patterns.   References and Notes 1. J. Howard, “New Ratings of Humanities Journals Do More Than Rank - They Rankle,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 55, No. 7 (October 10, 2008), p. A10. 2. Eugene Garfield, “Data from Arts & Humanities Citation Index Reveal the Interrelationships of Science and Humanities.” Current Contents 46 (1982) pp. 5-7. 3. Janus Linmans, “Why with bibliometrics the humanities does not need to be the weakest link.” Scientometrics 83, No. 2 (2010) pp. 337-354. 4. Loet Leydesdorff, Felix de Moya-Anegón, & Vincente P. Guerrero-Bote, “Journal Maps on the Basis of Scopus Data: A comparison with the Jour-nal Citation Reports of the ISI.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61, No. 2 (2010) pp. 352-369.  5. Loet Leydesdorff & Almila Akdag Salah, “Maps on the basis of the Arts & Humanities Citation Index: the journals Leonardo and Art Journal, and “Digital Humanities” as a topic,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61, No. 4 (2010) pp. 787-801. 6. P. Grant-Ryan, “Art of the Future: The Future of Art,” Leonardo, 20, No. 4 (1987) pp. 397-399. 7. E. H. Gombrich, Art and illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial perception. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1960). 8. R. Arnheim, Art and visual perception: a psy-chology of the creative eye. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954). 9. R. Arnheim, Visual thinking. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). 10. N. Goodman, Language of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub-lishing, 1988). 

The Development of the Journal Environment of Leonardo

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The Development of the Journal Environment of Leonardo

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