Replication report for Marwick (2025) “Is archaeology a science?”, including new data from OpenAlex

This document is a reproduction and replication of the first part of Ben Marwick’s paper published in Journal of Archaeological Science which analyzes the hard/soft position of archaeology and the evolution through time by the proxy of bibliometric data (Marwick, 2025). I confirm the complete computational reproducibility of Marwick (2025) while also pointing to few problems in the manuscript. As for the replication of the study, while Marwick’s article is based on the analysis of the Web of Science data of archaeological journals and articles, I use the data from OpenAlex, a free and open-source database. The analysis of the data from OpenAlex confirms the trends visible in the replicated study for the position of the trends of publication in archaeological journals, for its evolution through time, and for the classification of different journals. Some differences are still visible, mainly since OpenAlex data is less influenced by recent trends in the publication process due to its more balanced data for the second half of the 20th century. This study also emphasizes that using the free and open source OpenAlex database is suitable for this kind of scientometric study instead of commercial databases.