Science and its significant other: Representing the humanities in bibliometric scholarship

Bibliometrics offers a particular representation of science (Wouters, 1999; Nicolaisen 2007). Through bibliometric methods a bibliometrician will always highlight particular elements of publications, and through these elements operationalize particular representations of science, while obscuring other possible representations from view. Understanding bibliometrics as representation implies that a bibliometric analysis is always performative; a bibliometric analysis brings a particular representation of science into being that potentially influences the science system itself (e.g. Wyatt et al., 2017). The performative effects of bibliometrics have been studied primarily in relation to individual researchers' behavior and how pervasive representations (and particular indicators) might influence this (De Rijcke et al., 2016). How bibliometrics influence the ways we think about, compare and contrast different scientific domains in general has however not been systematically analyzed. The pervasiveness of bibliometric representations of science in the contemporary science system warrants such a study. Moreover, a systematic, historical view of the development of bibliometrics might also offer this scientific community a better understanding of itself as well as the future of the discipline.