STEP - Science and Technology in the European Periphery

The structure of the Arts & Humanities Citation Index:
A mapping on the basis of aggregated citations among 1,157 journals

Using the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) 2008, we apply mapping
techniques previously developed for mapping journal structures in the
Science and Social Science Citation Indices. Can a cognitive structure be
reconstructed from the aggregated citation patterns among these 1,157
journals containing 110,718 records? Both cosine-normalization (bottom up)
and factor analysis (top down) suggest a division into approximately twelve
subsets. The relations among these subsets are shown using various
visualization techniques. However, this structure could not be retrieved
using the ISI Subject Categories, including the 25 categories which are
specific to the AHCI. We discuss validation against the categories of the
Humanities Indicators (of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences) and
compare our results with the curriculum organization of the Humanities
Section of the College of Letters and Sciences of UCLA (as an example).

Authors: Loet Leydesdorff, Björn Hammarfelt, and Alkim Almila Akdag Salah

available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.1934