The Development of the Journal Environment of Leonardo

We present animations based on the aggregated journal-journal citations of Leonardo during the period 1974-2008. Leonardo is mainly cited by journals outside the arts domain for cultural reasons, for example, in neuropsychology and physics. Articles in Leonardo itself cite a large number of journals, but with a focus on the arts. Animations at this level of aggregation enable us to show the history of the journal from a network perspective. Scientometric indicators such as citations are increasingly used for the evaluation of performance [1]. In the arts and humanities, however, communication should not be considered primarily as a flow of information [2; cf. 3]. Nonetheless, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) of the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI)—currently owned by Thomson Reuters—contains a rich source of statistical information about journals [4]. For example, this data allows us to study a journal’s development over time in terms of aggregated crossjournal citation relations. While this mapping technique has been applied to journals in the domains of the sciences and social sciences, the ISI does not publish an aggregated Journal Citations Report (JCR) for the A&HCI. In another context, we constructed such an index [5] and focused on the journal Leonardo as a prime example of an art journal. We downloaded the bibliographic information for all articles published in Leonardo since its inception in 1968 and for all articles citing Leonardo during this whole period. The citations can indicate the impact of Leonardo on other (groups of) journals as proxies for fields of scholarly activity, whereas the references provided by the authors in Leonardo inform us about what these authors consider the relevant knowledge bases for their publications. Since the retrieved documents did not contain citation information for the period 1970-1973, we limited the analysis to publications since 1974 (5,859 documents). These papers contain 31,147 cited references and were cited 1,680 times. Additionally, we use the 65,285 citations in the citing documents to position Leonardo in its citation impact environment. Based on co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling, respectively and for each consecutive year, we generated animations available online at http://www.leydesdorff.net/journals/leon ardo/citing and http://www.leydesdorff.net/journals/leon ardo/cited/.