Below, two different counts of the times a reference is used: the most global cited documents, that points out when a paper is cited in Scopus; and the most local cited documents, that notes when the document is cited by another document which is also in the sample, that is, a document that belongs to the query "digital humanities". The first category shows what documents of the digital humanities field are influent in any area; while the second displays the most relevant documents for digital humanities itself.
The most cited is Big Data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts (Kitchin, 2014), with 849 citations, a paper that exposes the changes that big data will generate in epistemology, specifically producing new approaches: digital humanities and computational social sciences. For the author, it is urgent to develop critical refelctions within the academia to evaluate the impact of the emerging data-driven science.
Also in 2014, Mortara et al. publishes Learning cultural heritage by serious games, a paper that explores the role of inmersive technologies for the experiencing of cultural heritage; and, still in 2014, the paper Disciplinary differences in Twitter scholarly communication (Holmberg & Thelwall, 2014) is the third most globally cited of the sample. These three most global cited documents are not studing specifically digital humanities itself, but as a part of a broader trend or movement.
Picture 9. The 20 most global documents references ordered by number of citations. The plot was elaborated with bibliometrix (Sievert et al., 2021) and plotly (Sievert et al., 2021).
The first document of the list that treats, in a more specific maner, the question of digital humanities as an issue is the one of Berry (2012), where the author joins several relevant voices of the moment. The document is followed in the list by the article Enabled backchannel: conference Twitter use by digital humanists (Ross et al., 2011) which studies the use of twitter concretely by the digital humanities community.
As it can be seen, many of the references are from 2014, or around. Looking again at Picture 1, when the annual production was plotted, it can be seen that 2014 matches exactly at the end of a period, just before of a very important increase of the academic productivity. It can be stated that digital humanities are generating their most singular works in this moment, when Internet and digitization had been consolidated but the use of technology had also to expand to new areas.
The 3 most locally cited documents come from the same source: the Journal of Library Administration, which is a Q2 journal that publishes about research and trends fo libraries. The documents are: Digital Humanities and Libraries: A Conceptual Model (Sula, 2013); Evolving in Common: Creating Mutually Supportive Relationships Between Libraries and the Digital Humanities (Vandegrift & Varner, 2013); and No Half Measures: Overcoming Common Challenges to Doing Digital Humanities in the Library (Posner, 2013).
After that comes an article of Alan Liu (2013) The Meaning of the Digital Humanities, where the focus is more about the very identity of digital humanities, stating that, although they work with digital tools, they can not be confused with the field of the new media studies. In a similar way, the next paper of the list, A genealogy of digital humanities (Dalbello, 2011) studies the disciplinary transformation of the humanities through digital technologies.
Picture 10. The 20 most local citated documents ordered by number of citations. The plot was elaborated with bibliometrix (Sievert et al., 2021) and plotly (Sievert et al., 2021).
The authors production is quite distributed, in relation with the most used keywords. The professor of semantic media technology, Eero Hyvönen, at the Aalto University, Department of Computer Science, and director of Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG), together with his college, Jouni Tuominen, highlight a little over the rest, providing more documents to the largest keyword clusters. Checking their connections, they produceson subjects about linked data, semantic web, visualization, and cultural heritage. Indeed, there are more authors from Aalto Research, publishing together with Hyvönen and Tuominen, among the most productive authors detected in Picture 10: Mikko Koho and Petri Leskinen. Tehy also published around the same keywords. Their most cited work is WarSampo Data Service and Semantic Portal for Publishing Linked Open Data About the Second World War History (Hyvönen et al., 2016).
From Italy, University of Padua, highlights Maristella Agosti, full professor of Information Management System since 1987, speciallized in Information retrieval, digital libraries and hypertext systems. She has 133 documents in Scopus and being her most cited article as first author A formal model of annotations of digital content (Agosti & Ferro, 2007).
Picture 11. Three Fields Plot connecting the ten most productive authors, together with the 10 most frequent keywords and the 10 sources with more publications. The plot was elaborated with bibliometrix (Sievert et al., 2021) and plotly (Sievert et al., 2021).
Among the most publishing sources, stands out the Ceur Workshop Proceedings, a free open-access publication service at Sun SITE Central Europe, operated under the umbrella of RWTH Aachen University, in Germany. The journal publishes proceedings about different subjects like Applied Informatics, Scientific Space of Knowledge or Artificial Intelligence. There are a total of 170 documents in Scopus published in this source that use digital humanities in the title, abstract or as keyword. Recently, the journal has dedicated a volume about the Computational Humanities Research Conference (2021).
The second most productive source is the International Conference Proceedings Series of the Association for Computing Machinery, which has 85 documents that use digital humanities in the title, abstract or as keyword. The journal publishes about comptuing and information technology.
Indeed, the most productive sources are more about information and computer science, than properly humanities.
Picture 12. The 20 most local citated references ordered by number of citations. The plot was elaborated with bibliometrix (Sievert et al., 2021) and plotly (Sievert et al., 2021).
The most productive country is USA, with 452 articles, followed by United Kingdom, with 146, and Germany, with 116. The map also shows how many of these artiicles were created in collaboration with authors from other countries. Note that, in this ocasion, just articles are counted, not all type of documents, so the proportion is over a total of 1460 articles found with the initial query.
Picture 13. Articles by country, including the number that each country published with authors from other countries. Note that articles are not all type of documents that were used in the rest of the analysis. It is possible to make zoom to better observe the map. Own elaboration using bibliometrix (Sievert et al., 2021) and plotly (Sievert et al., 2021).