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In April 2022, scholars from a variety of different disciplines and training met in Berlin for a workshop on historical networks organized by ModelSEN. This workshop brought together scholars, who have a joint interest in approaches drawn from multi-layer net- work analysis to investigate historical processes that involve layers of different kinds and include both social and epistemic components. This paper summarizes the outcomes and is intended to serve as a starting point for further discussions and the strengthening of a community in Historical Network Research., The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Grant No. 01 UG2131) from 01.04.2021 to 31.03.2024 and part of Department I of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

These are the presentation slides from a recent webinar with Malte Vogl and Bernardo Buarque from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. In the session, they cover how Dimensions can be used for historical research. The use of bibliometrics resources for historical research poses different challenges than those we see commonly in their analyses for the evaluation of researchers and institutions. Any involved historian will immediately ask questions, such as: ‘How complete is the dataset?” ‘Can FOR categories be applied to research areas in older periods?’ ‘What about non-English speaking publications that were more relevant in previous decades?’ ‘What about countries that changed their borders over time, like West and East Germany?’ These questions are hard to answer, but in the webinar the hosts from the Max Planck Institute talk through an alternative perspective and showcase their approach to these questions and indeed, their potential answers. Using the Dimensions Analytics dataset, the team at the Max Planck Institute have developed an approach that allows for comparative historical analysis of research outputs of institutions or countries. They lay open the biases and pitfalls they encountered on the way, finishing with a spark of hope to make progress.