Say that the number of grand-cites an article a has is the number of pairs (b, c) such that b cites a and c cites b. It’s roughly the number of articles that cite something that cite it. (Roughly because it will count c twice if c cites two things that cite b.) I think it’s a better guide than regular citations to the subjects that are being discussed at a time.
But for now I mostly want to note a rather depressing feature of the demographics of grand citations. As I’ve discussed previously, I’ve got this database of 100 prominent philosophy journals, and how often they cite each other. At the end of this post, in Table 2, I’ve listed which journals they are, and when my data for them starts.
The data only runs through 2021, and I suspect (or at least hope) that what I’m about to report wouldn’t be true if we included data for the last three years.
So Table 1 lists the top 100 articles in the database by number of grand-cites they have. And here are two really striking, and incredibly depressing, features of the data.
- There are no sole authored papers by women in the top 50. The only women that appear are as co-authors of the only two papers to have three authors.
- There are no non-white authors in the top 50 at all.
Rank | Article | Citations | Grand-Citations |
---|---|---|---|
1 | David Lewis (1983) “New Work for a Theory of Universals” | 674 | 6126 |
2 | Alvin I. Goldman (1976) “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge” | 375 | 5273 |
3 | David Lewis (1973) “Causation” | 437 | 4591 |
4 | David Lewis (1979c) “Scorekeeping in a Language Game” | 367 | 4476 |
5 | David Lewis (1979a) “Attitudes De Dicto and De Se” | 366 | 4264 |
6 | Fred Dretske (1970) “Epistemic Operators” | 314 | 4221 |
7 | David Lewis (1996) “Elusive Knowledge” | 463 | 4168 |
8 | David Lewis (1979b) “Counterfactual Dependence and Time’s Arrow” | 346 | 3929 |
9 | Thomas Nagel (1974) “What is It Like To Be a Bat” | 605 | 3806 |
10 | Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden, and Carl F. Craver (2000) “Thinking About Mechanisms” | 458 | 3733 |
11 | Keith DeRose (1995) “Solving the Skeptical Problem” | 287 | 3577 |
12 | Robert Cummins (1975) “Functional Analysis” | 326 | 3310 |
13 | Tyler Burge (1993) “Content Preservation” | 290 | 3195 |
14 | Saul Kripke (1975) “Outline of a Theory of Truth” | 421 | 3183 |
15 | Harry G. Frankfurt (1969) “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” | 471 | 3144 |
16 | Harry G. Frankfurt (1971) “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” | 536 | 3071 |
17 | Stephen Yablo (1992) “Mental Causation” | 282 | 3003 |
18 | Bas C. van Fraassen (1984) “Belief and the Will” | 196 | 2729 |
19 | Keith DeRose (1991) “Epistemic Possibilities” | 110 | 2666 |
20 | Keith DeRose (1992) “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions” | 229 | 2612 |
21 | David Lewis (1994) “Humean Supervenience Debugged” | 274 | 2569 |
22 | Frank Jackson (1982) “Epiphenomenal Qualia” | 440 | 2513 |
23 | John Perry (1979) “The Problem of the Essential Indexical” | 392 | 2509 |
24 | Michael Friedman (1974) “Explanation and Scientific Understanding” | 233 | 2408 |
25 | Philip Kitcher (1981) “Explanatory Unification” | 232 | 2387 |
26 | Keith S. Donnellan (1966) “Reference and Definite Descriptions” | 354 | 2354 |
27 | David Lewis (1968) “Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic” | 214 | 2321 |
28 | Larry Wright (1973) “Functions” | 187 | 2271 |
29 | John Perry (1977) “Frege on Demonstratives” | 192 | 2242 |
30 | Elizabeth W. Prior, Robert Pargetter, and Frank Jackson (1982) “Three Theses About Dispositions” | 127 | 2230 |
31 | James Pryor (2000) “The Skeptic and the Dogmatist” | 332 | 2167 |
32 | Jonathan Schaffer (2010) “Monism: The Priority of the Whole” | 269 | 2158 |
33 | Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath (2002) “Evidence, Pragmatics, and Justification” | 185 | 2146 |
34 | Mark Johnston (1992) “How To Speak of the Colors” | 252 | 2142 |
35 | C. B. Martin (1994) “Dispositions and Conditionals” | 192 | 2131 |
36 | David Christensen (2007) “Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News” | 258 | 2103 |
37 | Fred Dretske (1977) “Laws of Nature” | 184 | 2063 |
38 | David Lewis (2000) “Causation as Influence” | 194 | 2003 |
39 | Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001) “Knowing How” | 248 | 1998 |
40 | Adam Elga (2007) “Reflection and Disagreement” | 270 | 1972 |
41 | David Lewis (1976) “Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities” | 231 | 1966 |
42 | Peter Railton (1986) “Moral Realism” | 229 | 1950 |
43 | Richard Feldman and Earl Conee (1985) “Evidentialism” | 159 | 1933 |
44 | H. P. Grice (1957) “Meaning” | 314 | 1932 |
45 | Frank Jackson (1977) “Causal Theory of Counterfactuals” | 55 | 1911 |
46 | Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers (1998) “The Extended Mind” | 390 | 1903 |
47 | Alvin I. Goldman (1967) “A Causal Theory of Knowing” | 150 | 1895 |
48 | David Lewis (1971) “Counterparts of Persons and Their Bodies” | 109 | 1889 |
49 | Tyler Burge (1986) “Individualism and Psychology” | 179 | 1880 |
50 | Paul M. Churchland (1981) “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes” | 264 | 1865 |
51 | G. C. Stine (1976) “Skepticism, Relevant Alternatives, and Deductive Closure” | 86 | 1849 |
52 | Ruth Garrett Millikan (1989) “In Defense of Proper Functions” | 163 | 1830 |
53 | Paul Benacerraf (1973) “Mathematical Truth” | 271 | 1826 |
54 | Fred Dretske (1981) “The Pragmatic Dimension of Knowledge” | 80 | 1808 |
55 | Keith DeRose (2003) “Assertion, Knowledge, and Context” | 195 | 1787 |
56 | John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley (2008) “Knowledge and Action” | 232 | 1785 |
57 | G. A. Cohen (1989) “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice” | 252 | 1785 |
58 | Timothy Williamson (1996) “Knowing and Asserting” | 149 | 1778 |
59 | David Lewis (1997) “Finkish Dispositions” | 207 | 1777 |
60 | Keith Lehrer and Thomas Paxson Jr. (1969) “Knowledge: Undefeated Justified True Belief” | 98 | 1774 |
61 | Allan Gibbard (1975) “Contingent Identity” | 138 | 1743 |
62 | Jaegwon Kim (1984) “Concepts of Supervenience” | 161 | 1737 |
63 | Nishi Shah (2003) “How Truth Governs Belief” | 154 | 1727 |
64 | David Lewis (1970) “How To Define Theoretical Terms” | 227 | 1705 |
65 | Dorothy Edgington (1995) “On Conditionals” | 181 | 1674 |
66 | Donald Davidson (1963) “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” | 357 | 1662 |
67 | John Broome (1999) “Normative Requirements” | 171 | 1630 |
68 | Karen Neander (1991) “Functions as Selected Effects: The Conceptual Analyst’s Defense” | 178 | 1626 |
69 | Jaegwon Kim (1978) “Supervenience and Nomological Incommensurables” | 77 | 1625 |
70 | Larry Laudan (1981) “A Confutation of Convergent Realism” | 259 | 1615 |
71 | Gregory S. Kavka (1983) “The Toxin Puzzle” | 156 | 1575 |
72 | George Boolos (1984) “To Be is To Be a Value of a Variable (Or To Be Some Values of Some Variables)” | 181 | 1530 |
73 | Robert Merrihew Adams (1979) “Primitive Thisness and Primitive Identity” | 121 | 1523 |
74 | Jon Barwise and Robin Cooper (1981) “Generalized Quantifiers and Natural-Language” | 210 | 1520 |
75 | Paul Benacerraf (1965) “What Numbers Could Not Be” | 226 | 1516 |
76 | Gilbert Harman (1965) “The Inference To the Best Explanation” | 190 | 1500 |
77 | Patrick Rysiew (2001) “The Context-Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions” | 107 | 1499 |
78 | Peter T. Geach (1965) “Assertion” | 155 | 1495 |
79 | J. J. C. Smart (1959) “Sensations and Brain Processes” | 176 | 1490 |
80 | Andy Egan (2007) “Epistemic Modals, Relativism and Assertion” | 115 | 1483 |
81 | Robert C. Stalnaker (1970) “Probability and Conditionals” | 88 | 1483 |
82 | Judith Jarvis Thomson (1983) “Parthood and Identity Across Time” | 93 | 1480 |
83 | Terrence Horgan (1982) “Supervenience and Microphysics” | 58 | 1479 |
84 | John Hardwig (1985) “Epistemic Dependence” | 134 | 1462 |
85 | Niko Kolodny (2005) “Why Be Rational?” | 219 | 1457 |
86 | Gary Watson (1975) “Free Agency” | 219 | 1453 |
87 | Alan Hájek (2003) “What Conditional Probability Could Not Be” | 136 | 1433 |
88 | Jason Stanley and Zoltán Gendler Szabó (2000) “On Quantifier Domain Restriction” | 168 | 1419 |
89 | David Lewis (1984) “Putnam’s Paradox” | 207 | 1410 |
90 | Gilbert Harman (1976) “Practical Reasoning” | 126 | 1408 |
91 | David Lewis (1966) “An Argument for the Identity Theory” | 135 | 1398 |
92 | Hartry Field (1973) “Theory Change and the Indeterminacy of Reference” | 135 | 1396 |
93 | Elizabeth S. Anderson (1999) “What is the Point of Equality?” | 321 | 1396 |
94 | Tyler Burge (1977) “Belief De Re” | 112 | 1385 |
95 | Sharon Street (2006) “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value” | 246 | 1384 |
96 | Christopher Boorse (1976) “Wright on Functions” | 82 | 1365 |
97 | Paul A. Boghossian and J. David Velleman (1989) “Color as a Secondary Quality” | 149 | 1363 |
98 | James M. Joyce (1998) “A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism” | 207 | 1351 |
99 | Jason Stanley (2000) “Context and Logical Form” | 133 | 1351 |
100 | John McDowell (1979) “Virtue and Reason” | 217 | 1343 |
I knew the statistics would be bad; I didn’t expect they would be this bad. I started doing this because I wanted to get a better sense of the central topics of the 1980s. So I started by looking at which articles from the 1980s had the most grand-citations by 1999. That list included some articles by Jaegwon Kim, and several more articles that were primarily about Kim. So I really was surprised to not see something of his higher up this list.
And I thought some articles by women, e.g., “What is the Point of Equality?” (Anderson 1999), or “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value” (Street 2006), would be higher. This is a counting stat, and they are at the back end of the top 100, so maybe they will move up over time. But then why isn’t “A Defense of Abortion” (Thomson 1971) or “Modern Moral Philosophy” (Anscombe 1958) there at all?
I don’t have a great theory for why grand-citations should have even more depressing demographics than citations themselves. But I thought the data was interesting enough to post.
In Figure 1 I’ve graphed the citations and grand-citations for articles that are in the top 100 by either one of these measures.
It’s fairly linear, though articles in ethics or mind are consistently below the trend-line, and articles in epistemology are consistently above it. Maybe that’s relevant to the demographics of the grand-citations.
To end I’ll list the journals that I’m using in this study, along with the data I have about them.
Journal | Articles | First Year | Last Year | Citations | Grand-Citations |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Journal of Philosophy | 2716 | 1956 | 2022 | 32614 | 241956 |
Philosophical Studies | 5212 | 1956 | 2022 | 29336 | 166856 |
Philosophical Review | 1015 | 1956 | 2022 | 22088 | 161383 |
Philosophy of Science | 3037 | 1956 | 2022 | 20308 | 132833 |
Synthese | 7005 | 1966 | 2022 | 23878 | 114020 |
Mind | 1914 | 1956 | 2022 | 15124 | 96747 |
Noûs | 1452 | 1975 | 2022 | 15929 | 94329 |
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research | 3170 | 1956 | 2022 | 16448 | 91867 |
Analysis | 2615 | 1975 | 2022 | 12476 | 78724 |
Australasian Journal of Philosophy | 1684 | 1975 | 2022 | 10449 | 67456 |
Ethics | 1681 | 1953 | 2022 | 12639 | 60633 |
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science | 1530 | 1956 | 2022 | 10085 | 57813 |
American Philosophical Quarterly | 1768 | 1964 | 2021 | 8866 | 54494 |
Philosophical Quarterly | 1342 | 1975 | 2022 | 8539 | 50608 |
Journal of Philosophical Logic | 1413 | 1972 | 2022 | 7865 | 43994 |
Philosophy & Public Affairs | 701 | 1971 | 2022 | 9541 | 41682 |
Linguistics and Philosophy | 836 | 1979 | 2022 | 5164 | 32626 |
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly | 1192 | 1980 | 2022 | 5103 | 32089 |
Journal of Symbolic Logic | 4248 | 1966 | 2022 | 9447 | 27313 |
Monist | 1913 | 1963 | 2022 | 5354 | 26860 |
Mind and Language | 846 | 1994 | 2022 | 4839 | 24145 |
Canadian Journal of Philosophy | 1505 | 1975 | 2022 | 4464 | 20792 |
Erkenntnis | 1744 | 2000 | 2022 | 5345 | 19942 |
Studies In History And Philosophy of Science | 1697 | 1974 | 2022 | 4534 | 18966 |
Biology and Philosophy | 1162 | 1988 | 2022 | 3890 | 17456 |
Philosophical Psychology | 1255 | 1991 | 2022 | 3128 | 13685 |
Ratio | 1040 | 1974 | 2022 | 2871 | 12771 |
Philosophy | 1960 | 1956 | 2023 | 3185 | 11780 |
Southern Journal of Philosophy | 1907 | 1976 | 2022 | 2511 | 11553 |
Philosophical Perspectives | 277 | 2007 | 2022 | 2390 | 10521 |
Inquiry | 1767 | 1966 | 2022 | 3229 | 10114 |
Philosophers’ Imprint | 353 | 2010 | 2022 | 2233 | 9392 |
British Journal of Aesthetics | 1370 | 1975 | 2022 | 2786 | 9192 |
Metaphilosophy | 1481 | 1975 | 2022 | 2228 | 9079 |
Journal of Consciousness Studies | 1396 | 2000 | 2022 | 2850 | 8736 |
Journal of Aesthetics And Art Criticism | 1475 | 1975 | 2022 | 2956 | 8600 |
Review of Metaphysics | 1578 | 1956 | 2022 | 2176 | 8381 |
Social Philosophy & Policy | 897 | 1983 | 2021 | 2076 | 8297 |
Philosophia | 2059 | 1975 | 2022 | 2091 | 7887 |
Episteme | 551 | 2005 | 2022 | 1899 | 7405 |
Economics and Philosophy | 548 | 1986 | 2022 | 1850 | 7197 |
Theory and Decision | 1861 | 1970 | 2022 | 2014 | 6542 |
Review of Symbolic Logic | 535 | 2008 | 2022 | 1795 | 6270 |
European Journal of Philosophy | 920 | 1998 | 2022 | 2047 | 6236 |
Journal of Political Philosophy | 592 | 1998 | 2022 | 2104 | 5837 |
Journal of the History of Philosophy | 1089 | 1975 | 2022 | 2586 | 5600 |
Journal of Medical Ethics | 4235 | 1975 | 2022 | 4298 | 5327 |
Topoi | 1115 | 1982 | 2022 | 1507 | 5071 |
Minds And Machines | 675 | 1992 | 2022 | 1374 | 4678 |
Philosophy of the Social Sciences | 985 | 1975 | 2023 | 1329 | 4219 |
Dialogue | 1488 | 1975 | 2022 | 979 | 3427 |
Kant-Studien | 1083 | 1975 | 2022 | 1403 | 3259 |
Law and Philosophy | 825 | 1982 | 2022 | 1199 | 2948 |
Journal of Value Inquiry | 1363 | 1980 | 2022 | 1115 | 2692 |
European Journal for Philosophy of Science | 449 | 2011 | 2022 | 906 | 2389 |
Journal of the History of Ideas | 2164 | 1956 | 2022 | 1560 | 2347 |
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice | 854 | 2008 | 2022 | 1272 | 2340 |
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society | 1141 | 1975 | 2022 | 1414 | 2292 |
Bulletin Of Symbolic Logic | 413 | 1997 | 2022 | 925 | 2258 |
Philosophical Explorations | 355 | 2008 | 2022 | 857 | 2127 |
Hypatia | 606 | 2009 | 2022 | 990 | 2078 |
Phronesis | 756 | 1975 | 2022 | 1364 | 2002 |
Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie | 681 | 1975 | 2022 | 823 | 1921 |
History and Philosophy of Logic | 478 | 1992 | 2022 | 735 | 1880 |
Philosophia Mathematica | 222 | 2008 | 2022 | 635 | 1839 |
Philosophy East & West | 1503 | 1966 | 2022 | 1431 | 1726 |
Journal of Indian Philosophy | 1055 | 1975 | 2022 | 1162 | 1718 |
Philosophy Compass | 541 | 2015 | 2023 | 1075 | 1606 |
Utilitas | 360 | 2009 | 2022 | 710 | 1450 |
Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic | 424 | 2009 | 2022 | 491 | 1437 |
Journal of Philosophical Research | 509 | 2005 | 2022 | 397 | 1395 |
Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal | 552 | 1995 | 2022 | 741 | 1374 |
International Journal for Philosophy of Religion | 1099 | 1975 | 2022 | 907 | 1350 |
Philosophical Forum | 808 | 1971 | 2022 | 466 | 1081 |
Theoria | 397 | 2007 | 2022 | 463 | 1064 |
Journal of Applied Philosophy | 598 | 2006 | 2022 | 777 | 1037 |
Politics, Philosophy & Economics | 290 | 2008 | 2023 | 521 | 1021 |
Studia Logica | 670 | 2010 | 2022 | 668 | 1017 |
Journal of Moral Philosophy | 354 | 2005 | 2022 | 599 | 998 |
Ethics and Information Technology | 445 | 2001 | 2022 | 593 | 988 |
Journal of Social Philosophy | 481 | 2008 | 2022 | 561 | 954 |
Res Philosophica | 293 | 2013 | 2022 | 426 | 944 |
Philosophical Investigations | 681 | 1983 | 2023 | 474 | 892 |
Social Epistemology | 423 | 2011 | 2022 | 479 | 886 |
International Philosophical Quarterly | 1551 | 1961 | 2022 | 633 | 876 |
Philosophy and Rhetoric | 889 | 1975 | 2022 | 800 | 872 |
Journal of the American Philosophical Association | 306 | 2015 | 2022 | 436 | 807 |
Journal of Chinese Philosophy | 1240 | 1973 | 2022 | 857 | 801 |
Logique et Analyse | 340 | 2007 | 2021 | 283 | 793 |
British Journal for the History of Philosophy | 765 | 2007 | 2022 | 720 | 760 |
Croatian Journal of Philosophy | 330 | 2007 | 2022 | 223 | 612 |
South African Journal of Philosophy | 729 | 1987 | 2022 | 464 | 610 |
Kantian Review | 294 | 2010 | 2022 | 357 | 596 |
Philosophical Papers | 234 | 2009 | 2022 | 258 | 594 |
Ergo | 213 | 2016 | 2021 | 336 | 462 |
Russell | 381 | 1975 | 2022 | 264 | 454 |
Thought | 188 | 2016 | 2021 | 202 | 312 |
Analytic Philosophy | 169 | 2016 | 2022 | 211 | 260 |
Heythrop Journal | 1484 | 1975 | 2022 | 299 | 179 |
Journal of the Philosophy Of History | 244 | 2010 | 2022 | 117 | 131 |