Bibliometrin och humaniora: En bibliometrisk analys av litteraturvetenskapen

Sammanfattning: The aim of this Master's thesis is to study whether bibliometrics can serve as a method to analyse the humanities. To investigate this a literature study was conducted that examined previous studies concerning bibliometrics and the humanities. Furthermore a bibliometric analysis of comparative literature was carried out. These research findings were then further examined through the perspective of theories on intellectual and social organization of the science The bibliometrical study includes 38 literature journals (11 855 articles in total) which were downloaded from ISI's Web of Science. The material was analysed by using co-citation analysis and co-word analysis. The results of the study are presented in five co-citation maps. Though the co-citation maps contain an excessive amount of data valuable and impactful results could be extracted from the maps. The maps show that within comparative literature references to primary sources (e.g. Homer) are mixed with references to researchers and theorists (e.g. Judith Butler). Furthermore, it can be concluded that the boundaries overlap with other sciences and that theories and methods from other scientific fields are frequently incorporated into literature. Moreover, the findings reveal that comparative literature is characterized by theoretical pluralism and that the individual scholars can be classified as polytheoretical. Both the comparative literature study and the bibliometric analysis prove that bibliometric methods can be applied to the humanities. Thus, in the future, bibliometric methods can be used to further investigate the humanities.