The Core Literature of the Historians of Venice

Abstract

Over the past decades, the humanities have been accumulating a growing body of literature at an increasing pace. How does this impact their traditional organization into disciplines and fields of research therein? This article considers history, by examining a citation network among recent monographs on the history of Venice. The resulting network is almost connected, clusters of monographs are identifiable according to specific disciplinary areas (history, history of architecture, and history of arts) or periods of time (middle ages, early modern, and modern history), and a map of the recent trends in the field is sketched. Most notably a set of highly cited works emerges as the core literature of the historians of Venice. This core literature comprises a mix of primary sources, works of reference, and scholarly monographs and is important in keeping the field connected: monographs usually cite a combination of few core and a variety of less well-cited works. Core primary sources and works of reference never age, while core scholarly monographs are replaced at a very slow rate by new ones. The reliance of new publications on the core literature is slowly rising over time, as the field gets increasingly more varied.

An empirical investigation of the tribes and their territories: Are research specialisms rural and urban?

“…The differences we observed in the study with respect to publication cultures between science and humanities specialisms have been illustrated before [van Leeuwen et al, 2016;Kulczycki et al, 2018] by showing the diversity of output types coming from the humanities versus the more monotone rhythm of journal publishing from natural sciences. Previous literature has also considered citation patterns over time, connected to the speed of knowledge becoming obsolete [Colavizza, 2017], and the way references are used [Knievel & Kellsey, 2005]. Our results indicate that reference behaviour in the humanities is very different compared to the sciences, both at the level of a specialism and a topic.…”

Science and its significant other: Representing the humanities in bibliometric scholarship

“…Bibliometricians have compared publication practices to an ideal‐typical notion of publication practices in the natural sciences (that is, English‐language journal publications). They have yet to study the cognitive differences between publication types (see Colavizza, ) or the role of different publication types (Sivertsen, ). What urgently needs investigation and proper conceptualization is the way publication practices relate to the cognitive and social structures that we find in the humanities.…”

“…They have yet to study the cognitive differences between publication types (see Colavizza, 2017b) or the role of different publication types (Sivertsen, 2016a). What urgently needs investigation and proper conceptualization is the way publication practices relate to the cognitive and social structures that we find in the humanities.…”

“…His findings thus suggest that it is highly problematic to understand each publication independently from all others. Colavizza (2017b), as we will show below, argued that monographs play a distinct role in the cognitive network of history publications and that this role is different from journal publications. There is then evidence that the diversity of publication types serves a particular function in the cognitive structure of the humanities that would, therefore, be qualitatively different from the cognitive structure of the other scientific domains.…”

The structural role of the core literature in history

“…to neuroscience), and organized into smaller topics for sorites, consistent across different networks. More recently, Colavizza [2017] considered the historiography on Venice using a novel monograph to book citation dataset. Results highlight the existence of a core literature, mainly composed of renown monographs, reference works and primary sources.…”