  We propose an operationalization of the rural and urban analogy introduced in
Becher and Trowler [2001]. According to them, a specialism is rural if it is
organized into many, smaller topics of research, with higher author mobility
among them, lower rate of collaboration and productivity, lower competition for
resources and citation recognitions compared to an urban specialism. It is
assumed that most humanities specialisms are rural while science specialisms
are in general urban: we set to test this hypothesis empirically. We first
propose an operationalization of the theory in most of its quantifiable
aspects. We then consider specialisms from history, literature, computer
science, biology, astronomy. Our results show that specialisms in the
humanities present a sensibly lower citation and textual connectivity, in
agreement with their organization into more, smaller topics per specialism, as
suggested by the analogy. We argue that the intellectual organization of rural
specialisms might indeed be qualitative different from urban ones, discouraging
the straightforward application of citation-based indicators commonly applied
to urban specialisms without a dedicated re-design in acknowledgement of these
differences.
