Method
In order to achieve its aims this project combines bibliometrics with interviews and a close reading of relevant literature.
H-Index
The H-index (Hirsch 2005) is a measure of an author’s academic impact that takes into account both the number of papers published by the author and the number of citations to these papers (Bornmann and Daniel 2005; 2007). Its main advantage is that it balances the effects of a small number of high hitting papers and a large number of rarely cited publications. Neither a researcher with a one-hit-wonder paper, nor one producing hundreds of mediocre publications will score high. The H-index therefore favours enduring performance both in terms of quality and quantity. We used publications and citations recorded in Google Scholar as it covers a higher number of publications than ISI Web of Knowledge, especially for the fields of Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities (Kousha and Thelwall 2008). In contrast to ISI Web of Knowledge, however, Google’s bibliographic indexing is automated and not routinely manually edited by Google staff making it prone to inconsistencies and duplication. We noticed that the H-index results for archaeologists were unrealistically low when only taking publications in Web of Knowledge into account, and Google Scholar was therefore considered the lesser of two evils.
Citation network analysis
Recently, a wider availability of powerful computational resources, bibliometric software (e.g. HISTCITE; PAJEK; PUBLISH OR PERISH) 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).
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).
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’s Arts and Humanities Citation Index) 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.
We came across some of these obstacles very early on during data collection for this project. Existing citation databases, like Web of Knowledge, 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.
References:
Beaudry, M., & White, J. 1994. Cowgirls with the Blues? A Study of Women’s Publication and the Citation of Women’s Work in Historical Archaeology. In C. Claassen (ed) Women in Archaeology, 138–158. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Bornmann, L., H.-D. Daniel. 2005. “Does the h-index for ranking of scientists really work?” Scientometrics 65 (3): 391-392. doi:10.1007/s11192-005-0281-4.
Bornmann, L., H.-D. Daniel. 2007. “What do we know about the h-index?” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 (9): 1381-1385. doi:10.1002/asi.20609.
Butzer, K.W. 2009. Evolution of an interdisciplinary enterprise: the Journal of Archaeological Science at 35years. Journal of Archaeological Science 36(9): p.1842–1846.
Eom, Y.-H., & Fortunato, S. 2011. Characterizing and Modeling Citation Dynamics M. Perc (ed). PLoS ONE 6(9): p.e24926.
Garfield, E., Irving, H.S., & Richard, J.T. 1964. The use of citation data in writing the history of science. Philadelphia: Institute for scientific information.
Garner, R. 1967. A computer-oriented graph theoretic analysis of citation index structures. In B. Flood (ed) Three drexel information science research studies, 3–46. Philadelphia: Drexel press.
Hirsch, J. E. 2005. “An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (46) (November 15): 16569-16572. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507655102.
Hutson, S. 2002. Gendered citation practices in American Antiquity and other archaeology journals. American antiquity 67(2): p.331–342.
Hutson, S.R. 2006. Self-Citation in Archaeology: Age, Gender, Prestige, and the Self. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 13(1): p.1–18.
Knievel, J.E., & Kellsey, C. 2005. Citation analysis for collection development: a comparative study of eight humanities fields. The Library Quarterly 75(2): p.142–168.
Kousha, K., M. Thelwall. 2007. “Sources of Google Scholar citations outside the Science Citation Index: A comparison between four science disciplines.” Scientometrics 74 (2): 273-294. doi:10.1007/s11192-008-0217-x.
Leydesdorff, L., Hammarfelt, B., & Salah, A. 2011. The structure of the Arts & Humanities Citation Index: A mapping on the basis of aggregated citations among 1,157 journals. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62(12): p.2414–2426.
Marriner, N. 2009. Currents and trends in the archaeological sciences. Journal of Archaeological Science 36(12): p.2811–2815.
Nederhof, A. 2006. Bibliometric monitoring of research performance in the Social Sciences and the Humanities : a review. Scientometrics 66(1): p.81–100.
Rehren, T., Grattan, J., & Klein, R. 2008. Going strong, and growing. Journal of Archaeological Science 35: p.94305.
Rosenswig, R. 2005. A tale of two antiquities: Evolving editorial policies of the SAA journals. The SAA Archeological Record 5(1): p.15–21.
Sterud, E. 1978. Changing Aims of Americanist Archaeology: A Citations Analysis of American Antiquity. 1946-1975. American Antiquity 43(2): p.294–302.
Victor, K., & Beaudry, M. 1992. Women’s Participation in American Prehistoric and Historic Archaeology: A Comparative Look at the Journals American Antiquity and Historical Archaeology. In C. Claassen (ed) Exploring Gender through Archaeology, 11–22. Madison, Wisconsin: Prehistory Press.