A Co-authorship Network Analysis of National and International Growth in Prehistoric Archaeology, Italy (1875–2000). Combining Bibliometric and Qualitative Data in History of Science Research

This paper examines the national and international growth of prehistoric archaeology in Italy from 1875 to 2000. A bibliometric approach is proposed for a case study of a scientific discipline, language and period that are poorly represented in current bibliographic databases. These constraints led to the generation of a data set with articles from 5 journals (2842 articles and 1221 unique authors). Publication language and author nationalities were manually included in the data set. Journal internationality measures and co-authorship network analyses showed: 1) that internationalisation was not the most striking change over the study period: it was one of a number of features that journal editors addressed in their own way; 2) results confirm a change in the social organisation of scientific production in archaeology, with the emergence of co-authorship and reflect the differentiation of local research trends. This is discussed with reference to previous work on the history of prehistoric archaeology.