Different approaches for measuring the publishing activity of researchers in Humanities

Introduction: We aim at The Workshop on Bibliometrics for the Social Sciences and Humanities to investigate different approaches for measuring the publishing activity of researchers in Humanities. In order to do that, we study the publishing activity of researchers in Humanities at one Danish university, namely Aalborg University (AAU) compared to researchers from all fields at AAU. In this way, the paper will continue the study by Lunn et al. (2012), with its focus on publishing activity in the Humanities.

Method: We will compare the share of publications from researchers in Humanities at Aalborg University with the overall share of publications from AAU. In order to measure prestige of the publications we use an internal yardstick, namely The Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator. The Bibliometric Research Indicator is a model that gives different weights for different types of publications and publication channels based on the so-called Authority Lists of publication channels. We also use external yardsticks namely the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) from Web of Science (WOS) and the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) from Scopus. Further, we will use the European Reference Index for the Humanities and their categorization of international journals in two levels, to see whether the development here corresponds with the development that can be found in the Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator, JIF and/or SNIP. In addition, we will look into the 14 different subject categories used in the ERIH lists, to see whether interesting differences can be identified. Similarly, we investigate the publishing activity in the 68 different research fields applied in the Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator, with a focus on the research fields used by humanistic scholars from AAU.

Preliminary results: A comparison of the publications by researchers in Humanities and the publications of researchers from all fields, show that the share of publications that has been given a weight, also called BFI-publications,
overall increases in the 10-year span investigated, while it decreases slightly for publications from the Humanities.
We have compared the share of publications in sources with ISSN with the two major citation databases, namely Scopus and WOS. Here, we see that the Humanities have a similar development in the share of publications in both databases as all research fields, though they as expected are much less represented.