A diachronic study of historiography

TL;DR

This study examines the evolution of historiography by analyzing bibliographic networks, revealing decreasing connectivity in reference-based networks but stable textual similarity, suggesting a shift in how historical scholarship remains interconnected.

Contribution

It provides a diachronic analysis of historiographical connectivity, highlighting the differing trends in reference and textual similarity networks over time.

Findings

Reference overlap networks show declining connectivity over time.

Textual similarity networks remain stable across the studied period.

Bibliographic coupling among authors also declines without increased collaboration.

Abstract

The humanities are often characterized by sociologists as having a low mutual dependence among scholars and high task uncertainty. According to Fuchs' theory of scientific change, this leads over time to intellectual and social fragmentation, as new scholarship accumulates in the absence of shared unifying theories. We consider here a set of specialisms in the discipline of history and measure the connectivity properties of their bibliographic coupling networks over time, in order to assess whether fragmentation is indeed occurring. We construct networks using both reference overlap and textual similarity. It is shown that the connectivity of reference overlap networks is gradually and steadily declining over time, whilst that of textual similarity networks is stable. Author bibliographic coupling networks also show signs of a decline in connectivity, in the absence of an increasing propensity for collaborations. We speculate that, despite the gradual weakening of ties among historians as mapped by references, new scholarship might be continually integrated through shared vocabularies and narratives. This would support our belief that citations are but one kind of bibliometric data to consider --- perhaps even of secondary importance --- when studying the humanities, while text should play a more prominent role.