Abstract
Citation indexes are by now part of the research infrastructure in use by
most scientists: a necessary tool in order to cope with the increasing amounts
of scientific literature being published. Commercial citation indexes are
designed for the sciences and have uneven coverage and unsatisfactory
characteristics for humanities scholars, while no comprehensive citation index
is published by a public organization. We argue that an open citation index for
the humanities is desirable, for four reasons: it would greatly improve and
accelerate the retrieval of sources, it would offer a way to interlink
collections across repositories (such as archives and libraries), it would
foster the adoption of metadata standards and best practices by all
stakeholders (including publishers) and it would contribute research data to
fields such as bibliometrics and science studies. We also suggest that the
citation index should be informed by a set of requirements relevant to the
humanities. We discuss four: source coverage must be comprehensive, including
books and citations to primary sources; there needs to be chronological depth,
as scholarship in the humanities remains relevant over time; the index should
be collection-driven, leveraging the accumulated thematic collections of
specialized research libraries; and it should be rich in context in order to
allow for the qualification of each citation, for example by providing citation
excerpts. We detail the fit-for-purpose research infrastructure which can make
the humanities citation index a reality. Ultimately, we argue that a citation
index for the humanities can be created by humanists, via a collaborative,
distributed and open effort.
Users
Please
log in to take part in the discussion (add own reviews or comments).