A Bibliometric Study of Articles Published in Twelve Humanities Journals

Guest post by Daniel Price. Daniel lives in Israel, has an MA in Library and Information Science from Bar Ilan University, and works as a librarian at Shalem College in Jerusalem.

The majority of bibliometric research has focused on the parameters of scientific and social scientific papers while the humanities have been somewhat neglected.

In a paper that can be accessed at here, I did a study of original research papers published in three journals in each of three subjects in the humanities: ethics, history and theoretical linguistics. I looked at the correlation between the number of authors, the length of the title and the paper, the number of references quoted, and how all these impact the article's impact factor.

Based on a paper written by two Iranian scholars from Tehran, I also sought to verify if there is a connection between the type of title of the papers and the number of times they are cited. The results are compared and contrasted to those found in previous research, and the extensive bibliography has plenty of suggestions for further reading.