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Humanities scholars integrate and aggregate data from many sources. They need tools and services to analyze digital data, as others do the sciences and social sciences, but also tools that assist them interpretation and contemplation.

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Borgman discussing the half-life of citations and humanities :

while the half-life of literature is considered to be the longest in humanities, the large comparative study discussed earlier found the shortest citation age of an average article in humanities…. [another study] also found that the usage of history articles was much more concentrated in recent publications and was the usage of articles in economics or mathematics (the three fields studied). A close inspection revealed that the use of history articles was widely scattered across countries, without the clustering around classic articles from the other two fields. Although history can be considered within the humanities or the social sciences, comparisons between these findings do reinforce others conclusions that humanists’ may read current journal articles to keep up with their fields, but rely more heavily for their research on sources not covered by journal indexes. The findings also amplify concerns about the validity of citation studies of journal literature in humanities, given the reliance on monographic and archival sources. In sum, the humanities draw on the longest literature time span of any of the disciplines, and yet have the least amount of their scholarly literature online. So far, they are the discipline most poorly served by the publications component of the content later.

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Literature in the Humanities goes out-of-print long before it goes out of date, so efforts to make older, out-of-copyright books available greatly benefit these fields.

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Borgman notes that the bibliographic coverage of journal literature is shallow in the humanities. The ISI Arts and humanity citation Index only goes back to 1975. In Sciences it goes back to 1900. In the social sciences it goes back to 1956. Also SCOPUS does not include the humanities.

What is interesting about this is that the humanities are the least cumulative of all the disciplines in the sense that they do not build on previous knowledge so much as we examine previous thought.

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Citation age of an average article is longest in the social sciences.