Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel looks at citation patterns across various disciplines, which confirms what casual observation would suggest: philosophy is not a high-citation field. As Professor Schwitzgebel notes:
Philosophy ranks 126th of the 131 subfields [by one measure of citations]. The 25th-most-cited researcher in philosophy, Alva Noe, has 3,600 citations in the Scopus database. In the top field, developmental biology, the 25th-most-cited researcher has 142,418 citations -- a ratio of almost 40:1. Even the 100th-most-cited researcher in developmental biology has more than five times as many citations as the single most cited philosopher in the database.
The results are similar on Google Scholar. There are relatively few living philosophers with more than 20,000 citations on Google Scholar, and most do work with interdisciplinary impact: e.g., David Chalmers, Elliott Sober, Ned Block, Stephen Stich, Philip Pettit, Will Kymlicka, and Anthony Appiah. (Among the exceptions to that generalization: Timothy Williamson or Christine Korsgaard, or Robert Brandom, but they are at the very top of their respective fields.) In chemistry, by contrast, any top ten department in the field will have a half-dozen faculty or more with more than 20,000 citations, and many will have faculty with 100,000 or more citations. Even very major senior figures in philosophy (e.g., Peter Railton or Stephen Yablo), by contrast, often have under 10,000 citations!
This matters, as Professor Schwitzgebel notes, insofar as administrators are interested in citations as "evidence": they need to understand that citation practices vary across fields, and that philosophy is a low-citation field relative to other disciplines.
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