VISUAL BROWSER TO THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES JOURNALS

On this website we display the position and environment of every individual journal in A&HCI (2008) based on their similarities in citation patterns.

The JOURNALS page contains a gallery where you can search for the name of a journal (using ctrl+f) and where clicking on a name provides you with two networks, visualizing the journals that have similar citation behavior with the journal you looked up. Further details about the methods used are provided at METHOD page and are elaborated in Leydesdorff & Salah (2001).[1]

We invite editors and researchers to use this website as an information retrieval tool for a first and quick glance onto the knowledge environment of journals.

Nowadays humanities is under the pressure of applying evaluation methods and indicators, which were originally designed for disciplines where journal-based communication is the leading paradigm. However as Eugene Garfield wrote in the announcement for the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), it is important to remember "that the history of science is replete with great scientists who combined both art and science to produce the quintessence of both" and that "the arts and humanities, no less than the sciences, need a large-scale index that provides multidisciplinary coverage," and that as an information retrieval tool A&HCI "might help preserve the elusive connective threads which are often lost when searching discipline-oriented indexes." [2]

This website is designed in this spirit of empowering scholars by providing sophisticated information retrieval tools. The maps we provide at the JOURNALS page entail agglomerated statistical analysis and network visualization of journal networks. Presenting these data, we want to show what is, in principle, possible with bibliographic tools and bibliometric methods. With this web presence we furthermore aim:

• To make networks of knowledge exchange between the arts and humanities journals visible to a wider public - beyond specialists in information sciences;
• To provide editors and editorial board members of ISI-covered journals with an insight into their "communicative environments" based on a specific analytical approach, which aim to complement their own perception of position, function and recognition of their journal
• To investigate if bibliometric research, and visual representations of complex data can help humanities scholars ask new questions.
• To give a short introduction to our method as well as a basic understanding to how a citation network is built.

On further pages (SCIENTOMETRICS, METHOD) we carefully discuss the background of the displayed networks and the pro and cons of using citation analysis in the humanities.

[1] Loet Leydesdorff & Almila Akdag Salah, Maps on the basis of the Arts &Humanities Citation Index: the journals Leonardo and Art Journal, and "Digital Humanities" as a topic, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61(4) (2010) 787-801
[2] Quotations from http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v3p204y1977-78.pdf