Critical Attention to Australian Novelists in Academic (Peer-Reviewed) Journals, 1950 to 2006

This dataset shows the results, from 1950 to 2006, for 'works about' published in, respectively, newspapers and academic journals. Identification of publications as newspapers or academic (peer-reviewed) journals was done manually. (NOTE: regarding academic publications, titles were categorised retrospectively, based on whether they were peer-reviewed in 2007.)

As discussed in Reading by Numbers, the capacity of this dataset to indicate critical attention to Australian novelists is inhibited by the original search parameters used. We defined an 'Australian novelist' as anyone who had written at least one 'Australian novel'. As a result, certain authors – such as David Williamson, Dorothy Hewett, Judith Wright and Les Murray – appear near the top of the critical rankings. However, this position arises from discussion of their poetry or plays, not their novels. In an effort to improve the capacity of the data to indicate authors known as novelists, we removed from the results all authors with only one novel: it is those modified results that appear here.

For the purpose of my analysis in Reading by Numbers, this modification created another problem: namely, although I knew from our original analysis of the data that Helen Darville/Demidenko had received a large amount of critical attention (relating to her novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper) she was no longer included in the results. To avoid missing this author, when analysing the results for critical attention to Australian novelists, I manually counted the 'works about' Darville/Demidenko (overall, in newspapers and academic journals) to include her in the rankings for these different categories.

本数据集呈现了1950年至2006年间，分别发表于报纸与学术期刊的"相关主题作品"的统计结果。相关出版物的报纸或学术（同行评议（peer-reviewed））期刊属性判定均通过人工完成。（注：关于学术出版物，其分类基于2007年是否经过同行评议完成回溯性归类。）

正如《Reading by Numbers》中所讨论的，本数据集用于反映学界对澳大利亚小说家的关注度的能力受到原始搜索参数的限制。我们将"澳大利亚小说家"定义为至少创作过一部"澳大利亚小说"的创作者。据此，大卫·威廉姆森（David Williamson）、多萝西·休伊特（Dorothy Hewett）、朱迪思·赖特（Judith Wright）与莱斯·默里（Les Murray）等部分作者在关注度排名中位居前列。但该排名靠前的原因源于学界对其诗歌或戏剧作品的讨论，而非小说创作。为优化数据集反映知名小说家关注度的能力，我们从统计结果中剔除了所有仅创作过一部小说的作者；此处呈现的正是经过上述修正后的统计结果。

在《Reading by Numbers》的分析中，这一修正带来了新的问题：尽管我通过原始数据分析得知，海伦·达维尔/德米坚科（Helen Darville/Demidenko）曾因小说《签纸之手》（The Hand that Signed the Paper）获得大量学术关注，但她并未被纳入修正后的结果中。为避免遗漏该作者，在分析澳大利亚小说家的学术关注度结果时，我手动统计了达维尔/德米坚科的所有"相关主题作品"（涵盖报纸与学术期刊全量数据），并将其纳入上述不同类别的排名当中。