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The references of references: a method to enrich humanities library catalogs with citation data

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Abstract

The 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.

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Notes

  1. http://freecite.library.brown.edu/.

  2. Using the Brat annotation environment available at http://brat.nlplab.org/. Cf. Stenetorp et al. [26].

  3. The last version is detailed in SBN [25].

  4. The full list of features is available upon request.

  5. The annotators use the online search interface of the library catalog to retrieve the BIDs. The search interface is available at http://www.sbn.it/opacsbn/opac/iccu/free.jsp.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Martina Babetto and Silvia Ferronato for the digitization and annotation of the dataset. The Library of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice willingly collaborated with bibliographical resources and logistics support. The Central Institute for the Union Catalogue of Italian Libraries and Bibliographic Information (ICCU) shared its catalog metadata with us. We thank both for their support. Finally, we thank our anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This project is funded by the Swiss National Fund under Division II, project number 205121_159961. Colavizza also benefits from a separate Swiss National Fund grant, number P1ELP2_168489.

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  1. Digital Humanities Laboratory, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Station 14, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Giovanni Colavizza, Matteo Romanello & Frédéric Kaplan

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  1. Giovanni Colavizza
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  2. Matteo Romanello
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  3. Frédéric Kaplan
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Correspondence to Giovanni Colavizza.

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Colavizza, G., Romanello, M. & Kaplan, F. The references of references: a method to enrich humanities library catalogs with citation data. Int J Digit Libr 19, 151–161 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-017-0210-1

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