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Interdisciplinarity and the intellectual base of literature studies: citation analysis of highly cited monographs

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Abstract

This article studies interdisciplinarity and the intellectual base of 34 literature journals using citation data from Web of Science. Data from two time periods, 1978–1987 and 1998–2007 were compared to reveal changes in the interdisciplinary citing of monographs. The study extends the analysis to non-source publications; using the classification of monographs to show changes in the intellectual base. There is support for increased interdisciplinary citing of sources, especially to the social sciences, and changes in the intellectual base reflect this. The results are explained using theories on the intellectual and social organization of scientific fields and the use of bibliometric methods on the humanities is discussed. The article demonstrates how citation analysis can provide insights into the communication patterns and intellectual structure of scholarly fields in the arts and humanities.

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Notes

  1. Journal Info. Lund University Libraries (Sweden). http://jinfo.lub.lu.se/ (2008-04-12).

  2. FRIDA. http://frida.usit.uio.no/ (2008-04-12).

  3. Guidelines. European reference index for the humanities. http://www.esf.org (2009-10-22).

  4. A simple search for Grammatology using Google Scholar resulted in 3680 citing articles. A similar search using Google book search retrieved 1050 references made to Grammatology from monographs (2010-10-5).

  5. The high number of citations to Lenin—nearly as many as to Shakespeare—can be explained by the inclusion of some Soviet journals where references to Lenin were almost mandatory.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Kerstin Rydbeck and Fredrik Åström as well as the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of ALM (Archives, Libraries & Museums), Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Björn Hammarfelt

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  1. Björn Hammarfelt
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Correspondence to Björn Hammarfelt.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 3, 4, and 5

Table 3 Studied journals
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Table 4 30 most frequently cited journals 1978–1987
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Table 5 30 most frequently cited journals 1998–2007
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Hammarfelt, B. Interdisciplinarity and the intellectual base of literature studies: citation analysis of highly cited monographs. Scientometrics 86, 705–725 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-010-0314-5

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