Historiografia prasy polskiej (do 1918 roku) : naukometryczna analiza dyscypliny 1945-2009

Abstract

The topic of this work is historiography of the Polish press, a highly specialized historical field, the distinctive feature of which is its particular area of study (the press and its contexts). The scope of this work includes the major areas in which the discipline operates: authors, institutions, methods, and publishing houses, the last component being the main focus. The central object of study are historical publications, seen both as a carrier of knowledge (usage perspective) and as a paradigm (methodological perspective). The main objective of this study is to systematize and evaluate the accumulated research into the history of the Polish press. An attempt is made at establishing, as precisely as possible, 1) research areas and the main problems, 2) level of the quantitative and qualitative processing 3) corpus of authors and 4) various contexts (such as institutional and political ones, among others), which influenced the research. The study is chiefly based on scientometric and bibliometric methods. Their application required previous research into the methodology itself, to confirm and justify the sense of using scientometrics in the humanities. The work went in two directions: first, it was aimed at tools construction and evaluation of scientometric and bibliometric theories; secondly, the theories and tools were applied to the research subject (historiography). The main research tool was a special data base (Indeks Cytowań Historiografii Mediów Polskich [ICHMP] – The Citation Index of the History of Polish Media) which records all scientific texts produced in years 1945–2009. The data base includes 24 627 documents connected in the matrix of 63 811 citations, of which 15 041 texts and 46 152 citations are related to the history of the press. The ICHMP data analysis served, in the first place, to prove that essentially historiography is not different from other sciences. Further, a whole range of specific features of historical sciences was identified (e.g. the high ranking position of the book as the main form of results presentation, the dominating section of national languages, a large section of one-author works). A very important factor in representing the research advancement was the special index of citation ≤ half-life. Apart from the scientometric methods, the tools used in this study were also the peer review and historical and press-specialist methods.