Contextual scientometrics: uncovering and understanding referencing patterns to the ancient canon in modern scholarly discourses

In modern academia, famous authors, thinkers and philosophers from the ancient world continue to shape scholarly discourses. However, precisely which canonical references we find in specific disciplines, and how often they are referred to, is yet to be investigated. The specific objectives of this PhD project are therefore to build a large, multi-disciplinary corpus of scientific journals from JSTOR. Next we will reuse existing computational workflows from the Trismegistos project (TM) to detect ancient canonic references in this corpus. The main analytical objective will be to analyse the extracted references in a scientometric way, allowing us to investigate which of the canonic thinkers are quoted the most in different disciplines and whether there are any diachronic trends to be found. Furthermore, we are interested in co-citation networks, which will help us to understand which canonic authors are frequently mentioned together and may be even forming canonic clusters. In addition to these more traditional scientometric approaches, a core methodological objective is to add a distant reading perspective to the analyses, which allows us to put the canonical references in context and better understand their usage. With this project we develop a novel approach called ‘contextual scientometrics’.