Bibliometric Study of Early Modern History in Spain based on Bibliographic References in Nacional Scientific Journals and Conference

Abstract

This study evaluates the historians’ work, with a selection of 1,282 source papers published on early Modern History in Spain during 2000 and 2001 (417 articles published in 15 journals, and 865 conference papers included in 14 different proceedings, see references). They contained 44,471 bibliographic references citations (with a repetition factor of 1.59) plus 19,269 references to archive documents or manuscripts. Some conclusions are obtained in a first approach: Although conference proceedings accounted for a larger number of papers ( 2/3 of total) than journals (1/3), coming from a similar number of chosen proceedings and journals(14 - 15), the proceedings were not cited more frequently (5.54%) than journal articles (18.53%). Historians work usually alone, their cites are 61.5% monographs, and historical materials reached 15.59% of all citations. The vernacular languages, Spanish and Catalonian, together represented 72.50% of the citations, followed by French; other languages were more indicative of the subjects studied. The average age of the citations was fairly high, with the 50th percentile being around 16-17 years. Although a core of 111 journals was identified, dispersal was very wide, for the 7,805 articles cited appeared in 2,132 periodicals, 1,301 of which published only one of the cited articles.