Information retrieval in the arts and humanities differs from that in the sciences because the documents required differ in many respects. Nevertheless, the Institute for Scientific Information® has successfully adapted its basic citation indexing system, first used in the "Science Citation Index"®, to its new "Arts & Humanities Citation Index™". Special adaptations of the system to meet the information needs of humanities scholars are discussed. The potential effects of the new index (and resulting data base) are seen as the promotion of interdisciplinary research, accessibility of bibliographic data for sociological and historical studies of humanities scholarship, and more objective methods for evaluating humanities journals.
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Eugene Garfield (1980) studied this question.