Rice, Louise. “Urban VIII, the Archangel Michael, and a Forgotten Project for the Apse Altar of St Peter’s.” The Burlington Magazine 134, no. 1072 (1992): 428-34. Accessed February 10, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/885200

Step 1)

What is the total number of citations? 6

What can you learn about the number of citations to this article per year since it was published? 2 years had 2 citations (2001, 2017), 2 years had 1 citation (1997, 1998)…but I don’t understand where the years are coming from because they don’t correspond to publication dates of the articles that are citing it. 

What can you learn about who cites this article?  What are their disciplinary identifications? 4 art historians cite the article, 1 Milton scholar (maybe? I wasn’t able to actually find the citation.)

Step 2)

What is the total number of publications? 7

What is the H-index? 2

What are the average citations per item? 1.86

Which of these numbers would you prefer to have used in evaluations for hiring and tenure?  Why? If I’m Louise Rice, number of publications. If I’m looking for impact on scholarship, probably H-index. None of these number seem particularly useful for hiring or tenure because they don’t actually provide a real representation of anything in this case.

Is this kind of analysis appropriate for all academic fields? Why or why not? I had a really difficult time even finding any of the articles that I thought were influential in my field in this database (this was the 7th article I tried), so I don’t feel that it is providing me with an accurate representation of the impact of the scholarship on my field. Part of the reason for this is that a lot of art historical scholarship is published in monographs or in edited volumes rather than in the journals that would appear in this database. I imagine this is true for a lot of humanities scholarship.