Google Scholar

People always seem to enjoy these sorts of posts, so I’ll list the results of some quick research I did this morning in connection with my administrative job. I’m Associate Vice Provost for Research, which means I’m responsible for trying to kick university research into overdrive, now that we have such a gorgeous, expensive new campus and such ambitious leadership.

Having recently voted in the Times Higher Education Supplement world university rankings, I was looking at their methodology a bit, and noticed that Google Scholar is one of their three sources for checking citations.

To get some sense of their numbers, I spent part of the morning plugging in various philosophy names. As you’ll see, the list is far from comprehensive, I just wanted to get a ballpark estimate of where people’s numbers line up. I mixed together a few 20th century classics, a few analytics, and a few present-day continental stars. I also plugged in a few people from my own generation (say, ages 35-45), and found (unsurprisingly) that Peter Hallward leads the pack of those I tried, so I’ll put him on the list as well.

I’ll give you the list first and save my thoughts for below. What I did is total up the number of citations for the Top 5 most cited works by each of these authors. The most-cited work is in parentheses.

Note: this was a quick check; my methodology wasn’t especially rigorous. For instance, in a few cases a book shows up twice, and I don’t know whether that means all citations should be totalled up for both, or whether there are redundant citations. So, I just took the larger number of the two in those cases.

36,947 FOUCAULT (Discipline and Punish = 14,514)
23,672 WITTGENSTEIN (Tractatus = 23,672)
19,665 BUTLER (Gender Trouble = 10, 312)
15,975 LATOUR (Science in Action = 4,353)
12,171 QUINE (Word and Object = 4,848)
11,183 DELEUZE (A Thousand Plateaus = 5,169)
9,901 HEIDEGGER (Being and Time = 5,243)
9,495 DERRIDA (Of Grammatology = 3,277)
7,290 PUTNAM (The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ = 2,573)
7,233 WHITEHEAD (Science and the Modern World = 2,626)
2,892 ZIZEK (The Sublime Object of Ideology = 1,625)
961 BADIOU (Ethics = 397)
418 DELANDA (Intensive Science = 243)
281 HALLWARD (Badiou: A Subject to Truth = 130)

(In case you’re wondering, my own total is 90, with Tool-Being the highest at 44.)

Again, these are rough eyeball totals from notecards, with the numbers added up in my head, so please don’t cite me as having done a scientific overview of the topic.

Some thoughts…

*At the very upper level of the profession, sheer quantity of citations is obviously a fairly blunt instrument.

*Being interdisciplinary obviously helps. Foucault is cited in just about every field in the humanities now. Latour is cited by a vast range of sociologists and anthropologists, and those fields surely tend to use more citations than (continental) philosophy. Butler is going to be cited by just about anyone working even peripherally on feminist topics. And so forth.

*Badiou may seem lower than expected, but remember that he’s really only been a superstar in the Anglophone world for about 10 years. Being and Event hasn’t been available in English for very long, and the fact that Being and Event has 119 citations while Hallward’s book on Badiou has 130 is pretty good evidence that simple time lag is a factor. Meillassoux barely registers, another indication of the time lag needed to move from reading a book to citing it in print. (4-5 years might not be too crazy an average in a slow-moving field like ours.)

*If anything surprises me, it’s perhaps that Zizek isn’t higher. The public has known him for just over 20 years, and he seems so culturally ubiquitous that you’d imagine him being cited ad nauseam; I’m not sure what the explanation would be.

*Heidegger is quite a bit lower than expected, but then again, his interdisciplinary power is less immediately digestible than that of Foucault or Latour. Even Derrida is a bit lower than I thought he would be.

But in a way, the upper reaches of the list are more of a carnival curiosity. None of us are likely to shift our personal estimates of the relative magnitude of major figures based on citation totals. We know about these people, we’ve read them, and we all have opinions about which of them are the most important. If you wanted to claim that Deleuze is a greater figure than Heidegger, citation totals would obviously be a ludicrous means of making the case.

And for practical university policy, which is what I’m involved with, you’re not likely to have one of these people on your faculty, unless you work for one of the upper echelon universities in the world. So, how useful are citation totals at the level most university administrations are going to deal with?

It would obviously vary by field. I would also guess (I’ll test this privately some time) that a solid analytic philosopher would generally have a lot more citations than a solid continental philosopher. Not only are the analytics a larger populace, they also tend to cite their peers horizontally more than we do. I’m sure that more than 90% of my citations are of classic figures, even dead ones, not of age-group peers working in my subfield.

I would also tend to think that what’s most important is probably meeting a certain threshold. Let’s say I were considering a tenure or promotion case. It wouldn’t bother me so much if someone were cited 30 times rather than 70. But if it were 0 times, or 2 or 3 (after a suitable interval following publication) then that would be more of a signal of something.