Citation networks among journal articles are perhaps the most common object of investigation in bibliometrics. For example, citation networks are widely used for science mapping as a way to explore... Show moreCitation networks among journal articles are perhaps the most common object of investigation in bibliometrics. For example, citation networks are widely used for science mapping as a way to explore the cognitive structure of scientific fields. Within this framework, the disciplines traditionally part of the humanities fare differently. Their main trait being the interplay of a broader array of publication typologies – monographs, edited volumes, journal articles – with a richer set of cited objects, including primary evidence. Consequently, when considered from a science mapping perspective, a community, field or specialism in the humanities might be represented as a multilayer network. We consider here a specialism in history, the history of Venice, and represent it using a set of publications including both books (edited and monographs) and journal articles. This set of publications is interconnected using three similarity measures: bibliographic coupling over references to books, bibliographic coupling over references to primary sources and textual similarity. The result is a multi-relation network with three distinct dimensions (that we will call layers), one per similarity measure, connecting the same publications. Given this representation, we proceed to analyse the different communities emerging from the three layers, to qualify them and consider to what extent they overlap or instead provide for orthogonal conceptual spaces. Show less
A long tradition of sociological research aims to understand the differences in the organizational and cognitive structure of scientific fields. This sociological tradition was in its earlier years... Show moreA long tradition of sociological research aims to understand the differences in the organizational and cognitive structure of scientific fields. This sociological tradition was in its earlier years intimately connected with the emerging field of bibliometric methods and applications, originated in the 1960s with the work of Storer and Price. However, the sociology of science and scientometrics have since the early 1980s drifted apart and attempts to reconcile them, or to reconcile the more theoretically inclined field of science and technology studies with scientometrics, have not had the desired effect. Recently, scholars have again argued for the need for interdisciplinary work bridging the sociology of science or science and technology studies with scientometrics. We take up these calls and explore ways to bridge the sociology of science with scientometrics by offering an operationalisation and empirical assessment of the rural and urban sociological framework by Becker and Trowler (2001). We compare ten specialisms from five disciplines: history, computer science, astrophysics, literature and biology, and study the connectivity properties of the bibliographic coupling networks of each. Our results show that the specialisms in the humanities possess a much lower connectivity, organising in many, smaller topics of research. They also show a lower reliance on shared core sources, contrary to the framework's predictions, suggesting that more theoretical and empirical work is required in order to fully characterise different specialisms of research. Show less
