For my citation analysis exercise, I downloaded 500 editions of the American Historical Review, and applied them to both text and citation analysis. The American Historical Review articles that I employed were drawn from Web of Science, and I did not set any time frame for them. The text analysis that I employed showed a web of connections between different key terms, such as “Empire” and “United States,” and shows how such terms are grouped more closely depending on the articles in which they were employed.
I created two bibliometric networks, one dealing with key terms present in the articles and the other dealing with shared citations. The exercise showed me that while key terms and the concepts they embody are shared by historians, historical articles do not often contain shared citations. For the citation analysis portion, I initially employed the criterion of two shared citations. However, in doing so, only two authors were connected. When I set the criterion for one shared citation, there were only six authors with shared connections. This may be a nuance characteristic of historical articles, as many articles are based on original research and have very few citations of secondary literature, which reduces the potential for shared citations. Furthermore, the few shared citations may have been due to book reviews, as an author would be cited by another author doing a review of their work. Also, as such authors would be in a similar field (if not the same field), the likelihood of them citing each other is higher.
The structure that I employed for my data, pertaining to the citation exercise, was limited by the minimum number of citations that I selected. This was further constrained by the limitations of citation analysis on historical journals, as mutual citations are not stressed to the same level in the field of history, as opposed to the sciences. While VOS viewer was helpful in showing the connections between key concepts and keywords across journal entries, the analysis of citations only further reflects the nature of articles and writing in the field of history.