7.5.3Some closing words

There is also another that can voice to its thoughts in the discussion. Krull and Tepperwien (2016) spoke on the part of funding organisations, when they reported on the possible evaluation of research in humanities. To avoid the application of quantitative indicators that are not adapted to the characteristics of humanities research, the evaluation of humanities research would need to be guided by four ‘I’s’, namely infrastructure, innovation, interdisciplinarity and internationality. Unlike in the sciences, where results are obtained based on experiments, observations, and proofs, in humanities those may be based on concepts and argumentation. Consequently, proposals and results may be excellent, although they are criticised, which may result in conflicts in interdisciplinary commissions.

The examples of the previous sections substantiate what Lienhard and Amschwand (2010) concluded for the research assessment in Law, namely that the responsibility for the creation and development of appropriate data sources and instruments, which are taking the peculiarities of research in these fields into account, cannot be left to the bibliometricians and evaluation experts alone. Besides the scientometricians’ interest in extending metrics to the social sciences and humanities, scientists in humanities too have recognised and experienced the need for adopting and developing quantitative methods to their disciplines for at least one decade. In this context, Shapiro (1992) called the attention to the roots of publication counting, citation indexing and citation analysis in “legal bibliometrics”, which has been forgotten or at least neglected by scientometricians. He concluded that, “therefore in law, the birthplace of citation study, even richer results may be possible than in the other fields to which that study has subsequently been applied” (Shapiro, 1992, p. 339). Thus, whenever scientometricians and humanities scholars together come up with true interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary solutions, this common tread could contribute to decrease the perceived or perhaps real relative isolation.

Acknowledgment

This dossier is an extended version of a piece by the authors published in the ISSI Newsletter, Vol. 19, Issue 1, pp. 7–11 (https://www.issi-society.org/publications/issi-newsletter/).