Citation Mining of Humanities Journals: The Progress to Date and the Challenges Ahead

Abstract

Even large citation indexes such as the Web of Science, Scopus or Google Scholar cover only a small fraction of the literature in the humanities. This coverage sensibly decreases going backwards in time. Citation mining of humanities publications — defined as an instance of bibliometric data mining and as a means to the end of building comprehensive citation indexes — remains an open problem. In this contribution we discuss the results of two recent projects in this area: Cited Loci and Linked Books. The former focused on the domain of classics, using journal articles in JSTOR as a corpus; the latter considered the historiography on Venice and a novel corpus of journals and monographs. Both projects attempted to mine citations of all kinds — abbreviated and not, to all types of sources, including primary sources — and considered a wide time span (19th to 21st century). We first discuss the current state of research in citation mining of humanities publications. We then present the various steps involved into this process, from corpus selection to data publication, discussing the peculiarities of the humanities. The approaches taken by the two projects are compared, allowing us to highlight disciplinary differences and commonalities, as well as shared challenges between historiography and classics on this respect. The resulting picture portrays humanities citation mining as a field with a great, yet mostly untapped potential, and a few still open challenges. The potential lies in using citations as a means to interconnect digitized collections at a large scale, by making explicit the linking function of bibliographic citations. As for the open challenges, a key issue is the existing need for an integrated metadata infrastructure and an appropriate legal framework to facilitate citation mining in the humanities.