The structural role of the core literature in history

Giovanni Colavizza ()
Additional contact information
Giovanni Colavizza: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Scientometrics, 2017, vol. 113, issue 3, No 28, 1787-1809

Abstract: Abstract The 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.

Keywords: Humanities; History; Core literature; Intellectual landscapes; Bibliographic coupling; Network connectivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-017-2550-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:113:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-017-2550-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-017-2550-4

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().