The Citation Process in Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Citation counts are a significant source of data for the evaluation of research by institutional managers and research grant providers when looking at projects and individual scholars. Raw citation counts, however, are inappropriate for this purpose except when seen in the context of comparative publications. This is usually accomplished by the normalization of citation counts within a discipline or subject area - as recognised by the major bibliometric databases. This process of normalisation is problematic for archaeology since these same databases recognise just two types of archaeology in either the arts and humanities or the sciences, whilst specialists writing in archaeological publications recognise as many as 50 different types of archaeological research.

This poster will explore the nature and variability of referencing practices within archaeological publications since 1970 that are the source of citation data. Specifically it will explore variation in the patterns of references made by the various subfields examining the spread of references made to other research areas, the referencing of publications of different ages, and differences in citations received between men and women and scholars by seniority. it will present a more detailed discussion concerning the limitations of citation counts in the evaluation of archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37862.0