1,721,043 research outputs found
A diachronic study of historiography
No full textThe 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
Understanding the history of the humanities from a bibliometric perspective: Expansion, conjunctures, and traditions in the last decades of venetian historiography (1950–2013)
No full textHistoriography is undergoing incessant expansion in the number of publications and active scholars, as is the case with the humanities and sciences in general. Little is known about what effects this has on the research activity and ways of publishing of historians, often stemming from long-established practices. Yet it seems recurrent that during and after periods of sustained growth, several historians lament the increasingly specialized and narrow focus of their domain. This article considers three journals that specialize in the history of Venice but that represent different scholarly traditions. These are analyzed over the most recent decades of modern historiography (1950–2013). Special attention is given to the use of evidence, as mapped by citations to primary sources. It is shown that at least three trends overlap: the sustained expansion in the number of publications and active scholars; the persisting editorial traditions of individual journals; and the conjunctures of the field, either via geographical and intellectual exchanges or by methodological turns. Ultimately, expansion, conjunctures, and traditions all need to be considered to picture the dynamics of a scholarly community over the long term
The structural role of the core literature in history
No full textThe intellectual landscapes of the humanities are mostly uncharted territory. Little is known on the ways published research of humanist scholars defines areas of intellectual activity. An open question relates to the structural role of core literature: highly cited sources, naturally playing a disproportionate role in the definition of intellectual landscapes. We introduce four indicators in order to map the structural role played by core sources into connecting different areas of the intellectual landscape of citing publications (i.e. communities in the bibliographic coupling network). All indicators factor out the influence of degree distributions by internalizing a null configuration model. By considering several datasets focused on history, we show that two distinct structural actions are performed by the core literature: a global one, by connecting otherwise separated communities in the landscape, or a local one, by rising connectivity within communities. In our study, the global action is mainly performed by small sets of scholarly monographs, reference works and primary sources, while the rest of the core, and especially most journal articles, acts mostly locally
Open access science in Wikipedia
Full text linkAs one of the largest online encyclopedias, Wikipedia is essential in conveying scientific information. To ensure the reliability of its information, Wikipedia relies on a variety of sources, including scientific articles. In this study, we assess the Open Access (OA) status of scientific articles cited in Wikipedia. To reach this goal, we mainly use the Wikipedia Citations dataset and equip it with Open Access status data from OpenAlex and journal information from Scimago. We find that 42% of all citations to scientific articles in Wikipedia are to Open Access articles, and the distribution of different Open Access types cited by Wikipedia is similar to that observed in academic literature: Bronze, Green, Gold, Hybrid. The scientific disciplines of biology, physics and mathematics have a high proportion of OA articles cited in Wikipedia, while history is the lowest. Our results provide a preliminary picture of how scientific articles shaped Wikipedia from the perspective of Open Access
Quantifying the higher-order influence of scientific publications
Full text linkCitation impact is commonly assessed using direct, first-order citation relations. We consider here instead the indirect influence of publications on new publications via citations. We present a novel method to quantify the higher-order citation influence of publications, considering both direct, or first-order, and indirect, or higher-order citations. In particular, we are interested in higher-order citation influence at the level of disciplines. We apply this method to the whole Web of Science data at the level of disciplines. We find that a significant amount of influence—42%—stems from higher-order citations. Furthermore, we show that higher-order citation influence is helpful to quantify and visualize citation flows among disciplines, and to assess their degree of interdisciplinarity
An empirical investigation of the tribes and their territories: Are research specialisms rural and urban?
No full textWe propose an operationalization of the rural and urban analogy introduced in Becher and Trowler (2001). According to them, a specialism is rural if it is organized into many, smaller topics of research, with higher author mobility among them, lower rate of collaboration and productivity, lower competition for resources and citation recognitions compared to an urban specialism. It is assumed that most humanities specialisms are rural while science specialisms are in general urban: we set to test this hypothesis empirically. We first propose an operationalization of the theory in most of its quantifiable aspects. We then consider specialisms from history, literature, computer science, biology, astronomy. Our results show that specialisms in the humanities present a sensibly lower citation and textual connectivity, in agreement with their organization into more, smaller topics per specialism, as suggested by the analogy. We argue that the intellectual organization of rural specialisms might indeed be qualitative different from urban ones, discouraging the straightforward application of citation-based indicators commonly applied to urban specialisms without a dedicated re-design in acknowledgement of these differences
The references of references: a method to enrich humanities library catalogs with citation data
No full textThe advent of large-scale citation indexes has greatly impacted the retrieval of scientific information in 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 have a longer than average life-span, mainly due to the importance of monographs for the field, this article proposes to use domain-specific reference monographs to bootstrap the enrichment of library catalogs with citation data. Reference monographs are works considered to be of particular importance in a research library setting, and likely to possess characteristic citation patterns. The article shows how to select a corpus of reference monographs, and proposes a pipeline to extract the network of publications they refer to. Results using a set of reference monographs in the domain of the history of Venice show that only 7% of extracted citations are made to publications already within the initial seed. Furthermore, the resulting citation network suggests the presence of a core set of works in the domain, cited more frequently than average
Benchmarking large language models for handwritten text recognition
Full text linkPurpose The aim of this work is to provide an overview of the current capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), assessing their potential when compared to traditional task-specific, supervised models. Design/methodology/approach The approach is that of using a set of openly-available benchmarks to compare different LLMs with strong task-specific supervised baselines for the task of HTR. Findings The results show that LLMs currently show a strong performance on English texts, yet they demonstrate a weaker performance on languages other than English, and do not possess a significant capability for self-correction. Moreover, their comparison with Transkribus’s models highlight the fact that proprietary LLM models are the best performing, in particular on modern handwriting, while for historical documents the overall performance comparison between LLMs and Transkribus is not consistent. Originality/value The authors are not aware of a similar study relying on open benchmarks
Mapping the early modern news flow: An enquiry by robust text reuse detection
No full textEarly modern printed gazettes relied on a system of news exchange and text reuse largely based on handwritten sources. The reconstruction of this information exchange system is possible by detecting reused texts. We present a method to individuate text borrowings within noisy OCRed texts from printed gazettes based on string kernels and local text alignment. We apply our methods on a corpus of Italian gazettes for the year 1648. Beside unveiling substantial overlaps in news sources, we are able to assess the editorial policy of different gazettes and account for a multi-faceted system of text reuse
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