  The intellectual landscapes of the humanities are mostly uncharted territory.
Little is known on the ways published research of humanist scholars defines
areas of intellectual activity. An open question relates to the structural role
of core literature: highly cited sources, naturally playing a disproportionate
role in the definition of intellectual landscapes. We introduce four indicators
in order to map the structural role played by core sources into connecting
different areas of the intellectual landscape of citing publications (i.e.
communities in the bibliographic coupling network). All indicators factor out
the influence of degree distributions by internalizing a null configuration
model. By considering several datasets focused on history, we show that two
distinct structural actions are performed by the core literature: a global one,
by connecting otherwise separated communities in the landscape, or a local one,
by rising connectivity within communities. In our study, the global action is
mainly performed by small sets of scholarly monographs, reference works and
primary sources, while the rest of the core, and especially most journal
articles, acts mostly locally.
