International comparison of departments' research performance in the humanities

Abstract

Methods are developed to compare the research performance of departments in two humanities disciplines, general linguistics and general literature. Departments from an Anglo-Saxon country were compared with several departments from European, non-Anglo-Saxon countries. A method was developed to reconstruct publication lists of departments, based on searches in various databases. We were able to retrieve 98% of the citations given to the work of one particular department. In both disciplines, it was found that the impact of some departments was largely dependent on their books and chapters, while other departments received most citations from their journal articles. The origins of citations were traced. Some departments had a largely local impact, whereas others showed a more cosmopolitan impact. Although there was some evidence of continental "self-citations," citations were also given across continents. The results indicate that bibliometric assessment of research performance is potentially useful in these humanities disciplines. © 1992 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.