Friday, May 07, 2010

The 200 Most-Cited Contemporary Authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Yesterday, I posted a list of the forty most-cited contemporary authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A number of people have expressed interest in seeing further down my list, so I am expanding it to 200.

Some caveats:

* "Contemporary" means born in 1900 or later.

* I excluded historical entries, so historians of philosophy will be underreprested.

* Each author is counted only once per entry, and then only if that author receives a bibliographical line on the entry's main page, as either first or solo author.

* The distribution of entries in the SEP should be expected to overrepresent the interests and perspectives of the editors of the SEP, and in particular the SEP has a strongly "analytic"/anglophone perspective.

* This measure emphasizes breadth of influence over depth.

* Citation patterns in the SEP are heavily biased toward recent works, with 2000 being the most cited year. (For a chart see the update to yesterday's entry.)
The list of 200 is too long for the main blog page, so I am posting it

here in the Underblog.

3 comments:

Matt said...

Did you factor in (or out) self-citation? I'm not sure how much it matters, but a quick look, for example, indicates that Sahotra Sarkar is cited 13 times in an article he wrote. I suppose he wrote that article because his work is important on the subject (and he's a very good philosopher in general- I'm not picking on him) but if 13 out of 21 citations to him are in his own article, that's at least _somewhat_ different than if all 21 are from other authors. (Obviously this is only a potential worry for a small number of the people covered by the study.)

Eric Schwitzgebel said...

Hi Matt: Since all those citations were in one entry that counts as only one "entry" in my record-keeping. Potential distortions due to the enthusiasm by a single entry writer are one reason I count the total entries appeared in rather than the total number of citations.

Matt said...

Thanks for the clarification, Eric.