Scientific self-knowledge: the necessity of university bibliographies and a database of publications by the staff of the faculty of humanities

Bibliographic lists of publications by lecturers and researchers form an essential part of academic biographies. They represent the intellectual output by the institution as well, and refer to the scientific medium of the fields studied by individual researchers. Applying for financial support or grants, acquiring higher scholarly qualifications and scientific degrees, or gaining higher positions in academic institutions are in high correlation with presenting bibliographical lists and making them part of the statistics reports of the institutions. The first section of the article briefly overviews the characteristics of scientific publications in the fields of humanities and social sciences and presents the evaluation difficulties arising from them. It also reviews the scientometric efforts taken to eliminate the difficulties mentioned and to provide relevant evaluation and ranking aspects, such as the Indicator of National Orientation (INO) and the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH). The second part outlines the Database of the Publications by the Staff of the Faculty of Humanities, Catholic University 'Pazmany Peter'. It overviews the first five years of developing the Database, the bibliographical challenges faced and the experiences gained.