The Present in Our Past: A Large-Scale Analysis of Canadian Historiography

Abstract

Using a bibliometric approach to understand the development of the Canadian history field, this research analyzes trends and characteristics as observed in articles published in eight major Canadian history journals from 1954 to 2021. Subject terms, geographic region terms, and citation counts are used as indicators of research attention in order to assess patterns from the articles on a macro-level. Central to this work is the idea that history is constructed and produced in various ways within contemporary contexts. While it is often evident how the past influences the present throughout history, this study aims to unearth ways in which the present actively informs our ideas of the past by documenting how Canadian history research is classified, and how that has changed over time. In applying quantitative methods to a portion of published works in the field, this research also proposes a new way of considering Canadian historiography.