Title: Science and its significant other: Representing the humanities in bibliometric scholarship,
Abstract: Bibliometrics offers a particular representation of science. Through
bibliometric methods a bibliometrician will always highlight particular
elements of publications, and through these elements operationalize particular
representations of science, while obscuring other possible representations from
view. Understanding bibliometrics as representation implies that a bibliometric
analysis is always performative: a bibliometric analysis brings a particular
representation of science into being that potentially influences the science
system itself. In this review we analyze the ways the humanities have been
represented throughout the history of bibliometrics, often in comparison to
other scientific domains or to a general notion of the sciences. Our review
discusses bibliometric scholarship between 1965 and 2016 that studies the
humanities empirically. We distinguish between two periods of bibliometric
scholarship. The first period, between 1965 and 1989, is characterized by a
sociological theoretical framework, the development and use of the Price index,
and small samples of journal publications as data sources. The second period,
from the mid-1980s up until the present day, is characterized by a new
hinterland, that of science policy and research evaluation, in which
bibliometric methods become embedded.