{"id":2605,"date":"2013-02-18T08:30:44","date_gmt":"2013-02-18T08:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/digitalhumanities\/?p=2605"},"modified":"2013-02-17T17:32:04","modified_gmt":"2013-02-17T17:32:04","slug":"sotondh-small-grants-a-connected-island-citation-network-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalhumanities.soton.ac.uk\/blog\/2605","title":{"rendered":"sotonDH small grants: A Connected Island? Citation Network Analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Tom Brughmans<\/a> and Iza Romanowska<\/a><\/p>\n This third blogpost about the Connected Island project will introduce our method for analysing publications and their citations. We will briefly discuss how citation network analysis works and the issues surrounding its applications. Finally, we will look at the very first results of this project: an analysis of publications about the Middle and Lower Palaeolithic in Hungary. Recently, a wider availability of powerful computational resources, bibliometric software (e.g. HISTCITE<\/a>; PAJEK<\/a>; PUBLISH OR PERISH<\/a>) and large bibliographic datasets in the sciences as well as the humanities resulted in significant progress in the analysis of citation networks in which vertices represent publications and a directed edge (or arc) between two vertices indicates a citation (Eom and Fortunato, 2011).<\/p>\n The foundations of citation network analysis were laid by Garfield et al. (1964) and the application of graph theory for citation network analysis was subsequently explored by Garner (1967). Despite this long tradition, its use in an archaeological context has not yet been thoroughly explored. In a number of studies researchers used simple counts of citations or other bibliometric data to track trends in the archaeological sciences and compare the impact and evolution of archaeological journals (e.g. Butzer, 2009; Marriner, 2009; Rehren et al., 2008; Rosenswig, 2005; Sterud, 1978), or to evaluate the impact of gender differentiation in archaeology (e.g. Beaudry and White, 1994; Hutson, 2002; 2006; Victor and Beaudry, 1992).<\/p>\n Citation network analyses in the Arts and Humanities are rare (Leydesdorff et al., 2011). The main reason for this is that the available citation databases for the Arts and Humanities (in particular the Institute for Scientific Information\u2019s Arts and Humanities Citation Index<\/a>) have significant limitations (Nederhof, 2006): books were until recently not indexed and publications in languages other than English are rare. However, monographs (rather than peer-reviewed journal articles) are often the dominant format of cited sources in the Humanities. Disciplines in the Arts and Humanities also show very different citation patterns and should therefore be considered separately (Knievel and Kellsey 2005). Despite these shortcomings citation analyses in the Arts and Humanities should not be discarded out of hand as it can still provide an alternative look at scientific practice through large aggregated datasets as long as the nature of the datasets and their limitations are thoroughly understood.<\/p>\n We came across some of these obstacles very early on during data collection for this project. Existing citation databases, like Web of Knowledge<\/a>, contained only a fraction of the publications we were interested in. Those that are indexed in this resource are mostly written in English by Western European researchers (with a few exceptions) and it only rarely includes publications in Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Slovakian, or Russian. Manual data collection was therefore necessary.<\/p>\n As a test-case we explored a small part of the project\u2019s dataset, containing the 31 synthetic publications about the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic in Hungary we found in Budapest\u2019s libraries. This collection of publications was written by nine Hungarian archaeologists between 1945 and 1990. This case-study aims to explore the citation patterns between them.<\/p>\n One would expect the older publications to be the most prominent since these had the time to accumulate the largest number of citations, and the results do show this process to some extent. Using the input domain measure (de Nooy et al., 2005: p. 193) we found that a few publications from the 50\u2019s and early 60\u2019s can be connected to by a larger number of nodes than any of the publications from the late 60\u2019s and later, which indicates that these few publications influenced (directly or indirectly) the largest number of other publications. All of these publications with a high input domain were in fact written by a single author L\u00e1szl\u00f3 V\u00e9rtes who, although being very often cited by his colleagues, is guilty of quite a bit of self-citation as well. Although self-citation is common in academia and completely understandable (one always builds on one\u2019s previous research), we needed to evaluate to what extent this affects the analytical techniques used. In this case the input domain seems to reflect largely the citation behaviour of one scholar who was extremely active throughout several decades.<\/p>\n Another way of evaluating the relative prominence of old and more recent publications is to look at the number of citations they received. It is interesting to note that the oldest as well as the recent publications receive a relatively small number of citations compared to a few publications from the mid- to late-60\u2018s. One of these is a monograph edited by V\u00e9rtes on one of the most important Middle Palaeolithic sites in Hungary, Tata, which also received a high input domain score. The second highly cited publication was a book about the Middle Palaeolithic in Hungary also written by V\u00e9rtes. The third most frequently cited work is a monograph about another prominent Middle Palaeolithic site, \u00c9rd, written by Veronika G\u00e1bori-Cs\u00e1nk.<\/p>\n In citation network analysis authoritative sources are often defined as publications that receive a high number of citations and particularly from so-called hubs. Hubs are defined as publications that cite a lot of other works especially authorities. Given these definitions we can identify the site monographs of Tata and \u00c9rd as well as the second highly cited book by V\u00e9rtes as such authorities. The hubs in this network are three publications by the same authors: Miklos G\u00e1bori. All three of these publications are reviews of the Hungarian Palaeolithic and due to their very nature will include a lot of references, especially to key site reports.<\/p>\n The above measures very much over-emphasize the most cited publications and the work of the most active authors. We should note, however, that six works in this citation network are not cited or do not cite any others. These include publications from the 60\u2019s by V\u00e9rtes and Gabori, a few publications from the 50\u2019s that seem to have been ignored by all those who followed, and the most recent publications from 1988 and 1990 that could not have been cited by others in this network.<\/p>\n
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Citation network analysis<\/h3>\n
A first test: the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic in Hungary<\/h3>\n
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Language of Publication<\/h3>\n