Arts and Humanities and the others: Why can’t we measure arts and humanities

Abstract

The use of numbers (publications and citations) to evaluate research/er performances are widespread since ease of use. However, disciplinary differences must be considered to evaluate research/ers accurately without misjudgments in tenures and incentives. The most different filed from others in terms of publications and citation patterns is Arts & Humanities. The main aim of this study is to reveal the main differences between Arts & Humanities and the other fields by considering publications, citations, and collaboration. For this aim, the main statistics for 59,728,700 papers published between 1980-2018 are gathered from InCites in terms of the 251 Web of Science subject categories. The data confirmed that Arts & Humanities is considerably different from other fields. We showed the degree of these differences using statistical measures. The huge difference found out that underline the indispensability for evaluating Arts & Humanities separately from the others.