Arts and humanities literature: Bibliometric characteristics of contributions by Turkish authors

Scholarly communication in arts and humanities differs from that in the sciences. Arts and humanities scholars rely primarily on monographs as a medium of publication whereas scientists consider articles that appear in scholarly journals as the single most important publication outlet. The number of journal citation studies in arts and humanities is therefore limited. In this paper we investigate the bibliometric characteristics of 507 arts and humanities journal articles written by authors affiliated with Turkish institutions and indexed in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) between the years 1975-2003. Journal articles constituted more than 60% of all publications. One-third of all contributions were published during the last four years (1999-2003) and appeared in 16 different journals. An overwhelming majority of contributions (91%) were written in English and 83% of them had single authorship. Researchers based at Turkish universities produced 90% of all publications. Two-thirds of references in publications were to monographs. The median age of all references was 12 years. Eighty percent of publications authored by Turkish arts and humanities scholars were not cited at all while the remaining 20% (or 99 publications) were cited 304 times (an average of three citations per publication). Self-citation ratio was 31%. Two-thirds of the cited publications got cited for the first time within two years of their publications.