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A diachronic study of historiography

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Abstract

The 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.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been funded in part by the Swiss National Fund with Grants 205121_159961 and P1ELP2_168489.

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  1. The Alan Turing Institute, British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB, United Kingdom

    Giovanni Colavizza

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  1. Giovanni Colavizza
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Correspondence to Giovanni Colavizza.

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Colavizza, G. A diachronic study of historiography. Scientometrics 117, 2117–2131 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2934-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2934-0

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