Rūta Petrauskaitė,  Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas; Research Council of Lithuania, Vilnius

Speech  at the conference   Technologies Transforming Research Assessment on March 19th, 2014 in Vilnius Lithuania.

 

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The presentation deals with the problem of bibliometric indicators such as citation indexes for the assessment of social sciences and humanities. It consists of two parts. In the first part,  an on-going project on the Database Lituanistika (hence DBT) is presented, specifically, its citation module. A pilot study and an attempt to provide citation indexes for the research in the field of SSH has been started with the aim to obtain citations for multiple purposes: for the descriptive and evaluative bibliometrics, ranking lists of research papers, information about references, to mention a few. DBT has been compiled since 2006, by January 2014 it contained more than thirty thousand  bibliographic  records, most of them used for citation analyses. A short overview and an evaluation of the results and the possibility to use them for research in Lithuanian studies assessment will be presented.

The second part deals with another pilot study, i.e. a discourse analyses of the research texts in humanities from DBT from the point of view of the functions of their citations. Citation is viewed in a broad sense as any intertextual link to another text: a full, a short citation, a close-to-text periphrases or free rendering verging with an allusion. The function of a citation is assumed to be the author’s reason to use it in the text, both explicit and implicit. A number of explicit reasons obtained from the annotated texts will be presented with a major emphases on the reasons that may considerable impede the reliability of citations indexes in the field of humanities. The presentation tempts to substantiate the need to investigate a variety and specificity of citation cultures in different subfields of social sciences and humanities before subscribing to metric-based research assessment.