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A longitudinal study of intellectual cohesion in digital humanities using bibliometric analyses

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Abstract

As digital humanities continues to expand and become more inclusive, little is known about the extent to which its knowledge is integrated. A bibliometric analysis of published literature in digital humanities was conducted to examine the degree of its intellectual cohesion over time (1989–2014). Co-authorship, article co-citation, and bibliographic coupling networks were generated so SNA based cohesion analysis can be applied. Modularity maximization partition was also performed to both co-citation and “author bibliographic coupling” networks to identify main research interests manifested in the literature. The results show that, as publications in digital humanities continue to grow, its diversity and coherence, two hallmarks of interdisciplinarity, have shown signs of becoming more robust. The co-author network, however, remained rather fragmented, with collaboration mainly limited by language and geographic boundaries. The domain specific practices in digital humanities that might contribute to such fragmentation was discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Library and Information Science, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan, ROC

    Muh-Chyun Tang, Yun Jen Cheng & Kuang Hua Chen

Authors
  1. Muh-Chyun Tang
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  2. Yun Jen Cheng
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  3. Kuang Hua Chen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Muh-Chyun Tang.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 4.

Table 4 The most frequent author keywords in three stages
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Appendix 2

See Table 5.

Table 5 Significant works in DH co-citation network
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Tang, MC., Cheng, Y.J. & Chen, K.H. A longitudinal study of intellectual cohesion in digital humanities using bibliometric analyses. Scientometrics 113, 985–1008 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2496-6

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