Last modified: 2018-06-20
Abstract
Citation analysis is the core area of quantitative studies of science (scientometrics). Citations are currently used (and sometimes abused) in science to gauge the scientific impact of journals, institutions, research teams, even individual researchers, with a proliferation of indexes and metrics. However, evaluation is not the only purpose of citation analysis. In fact, interesting features of scientific fields, such as their morphology and evolution, can be traced by citation analysis methodologies, shedding light on topics which could be hardly addressed by qualitative methodologies.
In this paper, I discuss the potentiality of citation analysis to study a field that presents peculiar features: analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy is usually classified as a Humanistic field. However, many commentators observed that, especially in the last decades, it has adopted a scientific style of intellectual production, which makes it more similar to a Kuhnian normal science than a standard humanistic field. Moreover, at least since the Eighties, analytic philosophy underwent a process of growing specialization, fragmentation and technicalization – phenomena that can be accounted in a Kuhnian perspective.
I will present three citation analysis based studies of analytic philosophy, to give an idea of the kind of topics that might be addressed by this methodology.
The first study makes use of co-citation networks (the so-called “science-maps”) to track the increasing fragmentation of the field in distinct sub-disciplines. Specialization will be recognized as a specific pattern in subsequent co-citation networks.
Specialization will be the target also of the second study. I will present a “Classic Index”, which calculates how many classics (i.e. highly cited reference) are cited, in average, in the bibliographies of analytic philosophy papers. This index may be interpreted as a measure of the “locality” vs. “generality” of a paper.
Finally, the third study integrates traditional close reading with descriptive statistics, focusing on the reasons behind citation behavior in analytic philosophy. Whereas in science the main aim of citations is supporting the claims of the citing paper, in the case of analytic philosophy citations serve diverse purposes. In this study, citations are classified according to the function they serve in the citing papers. Working with a representative sample of analytic philosophy papers from 1950s to 2000s, this study clarifies the balance between consensus and disagreement in analytic philosophy, illuminating the measure in which analytic philosophy is comparable to a Kuhnian normal science.