18.739 measuring and questioning impact

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 739.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2005 07:22:24 +0100
         From: "Wesley N. Raabe" <wnr4c_at_cms.mail.virginia.edu>
         Subject: Re: 18.736 measuring and questioning impact

Using sources like the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and Social
Sciences Citation Index, perhaps a researcher could differentiate between
those scholars who are frequently cited because they are all part of a
clique and those who are frequently cited because widely influential beyond
their clique.

One could easily be mislead on accident, as Norman Hinton demonstrates. Add
name changes that follow marriages and divorces to personal idiosyncrasies,
and I assume that many scholars would have more than one identity. The
researcher could also be foiled by Randall McCleod in the MLA International
Bibliography, whose appearance under a variety of spellings (as the
Renaissance writers he discusses do: Shakespeare, Shakspear, Shakspeare) is
a serious point that frustrates enumerative bibliographies.

Wesley (N.?) Raabe
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of English
University of Virginia
Received on Mon Apr 25 2005 - 02:39:29 EDT