A BIBLIOMETRIC STUDY OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, A HUMANITIES SUBJECT LITERATURE.

摘要

A considerable amount of literature has been devoted to defining the differences between scholarship in the sciences and scholarship in the humanities. However, these characteristics of users, literature, etc., so often acknowledged as truths, have not been substantiated by studies, other than a limited number conducted on comparatively small scales. Likewise, bibliometric techniques so often applied to the science and social science literatures, have only been applied to literatures in the humanities to a very limited extent. Consequently, the purpose of this project was to apply several available bibliometric techniques to a near exhaustive bibliography in the humanities in order to provide the statistical data needed to substantiate or repudiate the aforementioned claims.;The results showed that, in general, the sociology of all scholarship, as reflected by literature characteristics, is basically the same. Differences attributed to the humanities are differences of degree only. Furthermore, it was shown that not only could bibliometric techniques be successfully applied to a humanities literature, but how the application of these methods could provide an objective means for performing various library operations.;The bibliographic file selected for the project was comprised of the 4,434 citations from the ethnomusicology bibliography of a ten year span of RILM Abstracts. To this bibliographic file, the following hypotheses were tested: (1) that the 20/80 rule set forth by Trueswell would apply to the publications and their publishing sources; (2) that Lotka's law would describe their author productivity and stratification; (3) that despite the tendency of humanities' authors to work alone, the minority who do co-author are those most productive in their subject area; (4) that titles in ethnomusicology are primarily non-descriptive in terms of content description; (5) that the migration pattern of authors in this subject among the nine sub-areas can be predicted by Goffman's application of the theory of Markov chains; and (6) that there is a verifiable relationship between quantity and quality in ethnomusicology.