Some Data on Citation Trends
Some teasers for future research.
One of my plans is to write something about the history of recent philosophy that starts with trends in citation data. To start, I've downloaded the citation stats for 100 journals, and looked at which articles have changed their citation frequency.
For each year from 1976-2015, I found the most cited articles from that year, the articles that were most cited soon after publication, and the articles that have been most recently cited. I merged those lists to find 9 somewhat representative articles from each year, and looked at how often each were cited over time in the 100 journals I’m looking at. So here were the 9 articles from 1984.
D Lewis, “Putnam’s Paradox,” Australasian Journal Of Philosophy 62 (3): 221-236.
BC van Fraassen, “Belief and the Will,” Journal Of Philosophy 81 (5): 235-256.
P Railton, “Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 13 (2): 134-171.
G Boolos, “To Be is To Be a Value of a Variable (Or To Be Some Values of Some Variables),” Journal Of Philosophy 81 (8): 430-449.
J Kim, “Concepts of Supervenience,” Philosophy And Phenomenological Research 45 (2): 153-176.
S Cohen, “Justification and Truth,” Philosophical Studies 46 (3): 279-295.
J Fodor, “Observation Reconsidered,” Philosophy Of Science 51 (1): 23-43.
J Kim, “Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation,” Midwest Studies In Philosophy 9: 257-270.
P Kitcher, “Species,” Philosophy Of Science 51 (2): 308-333.
They are all by male authors, which is common before the mid-1980s, but thankfully rarer afterwards. Here are two graphs showing how often each has been cited in the years since.
The articles on supervenience stop getting cited; the articles on probability (van Fraassen), consequentialism (Railton), and foundational metaphysics (Lewis) are much more widely cited now than they were soon after publication. Looking at trends like this is one way to get a feel for how the field has changed in a way that’s a bit more epistemically secure than (just) chatting with my friends about how their interests have changed.
If you want similar graphs for the other 39 years, there’s an initial post about it at my site: https://brian.weatherson.org/quarto/posts/citations-raw-data/citations.html. Perhaps if I knew how to get Quarto to output a Substack post I’d have just posted that directly here.
I've got some ideas for further studies based on this data from Eugenio Petrovich's excellent book A Quantitative Portrait of Analytic Philosophy. One thing he finds is an interesting break in the data some time around 2000. Citations change from year to year (since temporally backwards citation is rare), but in his data they changed a lot around then. That's interesting, and I'm going to see if the data I'm looking at help explain his finding.
There were a lot of distinctive topics that became hot topics around then: e.g., non-conceptual content, fictionalism, zombies, vagueness, self-locating belief, verbal disputes. Could the change just be a change in which topics were fashionable, or was it something deeper?
Other things I want to look at include:
The relationship between David Lewis’s 1980s AJP articles and other articles in the AJP.
How Frank Jackson’s paper “Epiphenomenal Qualia” came to be cited so much more than his “What Mary Didn’t Know”.
Why different papers by the Churchlands have such different citation histories.
Whether it’s possible to separate out age, period, and cohort effects in the citation trends.
In particular, whether there was something distinctive about the 1986-1990 cohort that explains the relatively low citation numbers for papers published then.1
How we went from supervenience, to truthmaking, to grounding, and how that shows up in debates about physicalism.
How egalitarianism, and different ways of understanding egalitarianism, became central to political philosophy.
How the literature on trust developed, and became a central philosophical topic. (And possibly how that relates to the rise of social metaphysics/epistemology/mind).
What ‘Sleeping Beauty’ papers there are; i.e., papers which became widely cited after a long period of being barely cited or cited not at all.2
And hopefully there will be many more things to come. But for now I just wanted to make sure some of the data is available, and see what other thoughts people have for ways to investigate it.
My guess is that it’s the result of books, especially Inquiry, Change in View, and On the Plurality of Worlds, being somewhat more important for a few years, but I don’t really have a good theory here.
Given how often David Lewis gets cited in the data, he has twice as many papers on the list of widely cited articles as anyone, I did not expect any of his papers to fit this descriptions. But “Ordering Semantics and Premise Semantics”, and “Logic for Equivocators”, both seem to. The latter has a particularly interesting citation history, which might be useful for bringing out connections between discussions that aren’t always obvious.
Am I wrong to think from eyeballing the entire post at your website that more recent papers get uptake faster than the 20th century cohorts? If so could one reason be that citation practices have improved (we cite more) and the internet just makes preprints and online publication so much more efficient and accessible, which accelerates citation rates?