The references of references: a method to enrich humanities library catalogs with citation data

The advent of large-scale citation indexes has greatly impacted the retrieval of scientific information in several domains of research. The humanities have largely remained outside of this shift, despite their increasing reliance on digital means for information seeking. Given that publications in the humanities have a longer than average life-span, mainly due to the importance of monographs for the field, this article proposes to use domain-specific reference monographs to bootstrap the enrichment of library catalogs with citation data. Reference monographs are works considered to be of particular importance in a research library setting, and likely to possess characteristic citation patterns. The article shows how to select a corpus of reference monographs, and proposes a pipeline to extract the network of publications they refer to. Results using a set of reference monographs in the domain of the history of Venice show that only 7% of extracted citations are made to publications already within the initial seed. Furthermore, the resulting citation network suggests the presence of a core set of works in the domain, cited more frequently than average.