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Dissertation
Spanning boundaries: an interdisciplinary citation study based on literary-studies author co-citation clusters
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Drexel University
1999
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/00000825
Abstract
This quantitative research study examines the modern academic phenomenon of scholarly communication across disciplinary boundaries. The study uses the discipline of literary studies to empirically demonstrate the influence of one discipline on other disciplines by examining cited references to authors representing literary studies in two citation databases, Arts and Humanities Search (A&HS) and Social SciSearch (SSCI). There are conflicting anecdotal accounts that report literary studies exerts considerable influence on disciplines in the social sciences, and, also, that literary studies had lost its unique identity by annexing the social sciences. This study attempts to scientifically examine these subjective accounts of disciplinary boundary spanning. A goal of this thesis is to contribute quantitative and empirical techniques to the formal study of scholarly communication. The study proposes that any arts and humanities discipline that is text-based can be described by quantitative techniques, and that descriptive statistics can reveal disciplinary boundary spanning by identifying the disciplines that have been influenced by another discipline. Literary studies, in this dissertation, is represented by a sample of 88 authors. These authors are grouped into 11 and sometimes 12 schools of thought or author-clusters: constructionists, contextualists, moralists, phenomenologists, rhetoricians, Marxists, philosophers, commentators, African-Americans, feminists, and deconstructionists-core and Freudian. It was found that the core deconstructionists and commentators hold a central position in literary studies, and that no school of thought is isolated from the others. References to the schools of thought are the criteria used to determine whether and how literary studies influences other disciplines. The years considered are 1980 through 1997. The data indicated: (1) the commentators author-cluster is the most referenced cluster across the databases and this has remained constant over time; (2) the social sciences have been more influenced by literary studies during the years 1989 to 1997 than during the period 1980 to 1989; (3) the disciplines most referencing literary-studies author-clusters are other literary disciplines, and this has remained constant over time; (4) there are similarities in the cited works most referenced by the disciplines in the social sciences and the arts and humanities; (5) Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the most cited work by both social scientists and humanists. The two-step approach used in this thesis will enable scholars to give a holistic response to the question of relations between disciplines.
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Details
- Title
- Spanning boundaries
- Creators
- Hinda Feige Greenberg
- Contributors
- Howard Dalby White (Advisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Drexel University
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
- Publisher
- Drexel University; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Number of pages
- x, 173 pages
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- College of Information Science and Technology (1995-2013); Drexel University
- Other Identifier
- 991014970200704721