Quantitative perspectives on fifty years of the Journal of the History of Biology
Quantitative perspectives on fifty years of the Journal of the History of Biology
Date
2017-10
Authors
Peirson, Erick
Bottino, Erin
Damerow, Julia L.
Laubichler, Manfred D.
Bottino, Erin
Damerow, Julia L.
Laubichler, Manfred D.
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Abstract
Journal of the History of Biology provides a fifty-year long record for examining the evolution
of the history of biology as a scholarly discipline. In this paper, we present a new dataset and preliminary
quantitative analysis of the thematic content of JHB from the perspectives of geography, organisms, and
thematic fields. The geographic diversity of authors whose work appears in JHB has increased steadily
since 1968, but the geographic coverage of the content of JHB articles remains strongly lopsided toward
the United States, United Kingdom, and western Europe and has diversified much less dramatically over
time. The taxonomic diversity of organisms discussed in JHB increased steadily between 1968 and the
late 1990s but declined in later years, mirroring broader patterns of diversification previously reported in
the biomedical research literature. Finally, we used a combination of topic modeling and nonlinear
dimensionality reduction techniques to develop a model of multi-article fields within JHB. We found
evidence for directional changes in the representation of fields on multiple scales. The diversity of JHB
with regard to the representation of thematic fields has increased overall, with most of that diversification
occurring in recent years. Drawing on the dataset generated in the course of this analysis, as well as web
services in the emerging digital history and philosophy of science ecosystem, we have developed an
interactive web platform for exploring the content of JHB, and we provide a brief overview of the
platform in this article. As a whole, the data and analyses presented here provide a starting-place for
further critical reflection on the evolution of the history of biology over the past half-century.
Description
Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the History of Biology 50 (2017): 695-751, doi:10.1007/s10739-017-9499-2.