UPDATED! NOW MORE COMPLETE THAN EVER!
(As comments and email give me more info, I'll be updating this post off and on during the week. If you see an oversite or erroneous info—especially omission of your book!—feel free to email me directly at <[email protected]> or comment below, as you prefer. Ideally, give me <author, title, year of pub>. Thanks.)
------------
This is one of those “sociology of the profession” posts that Real Philosophers should scrupulously avoid reading, because of its déclassé nature. So, read on my friends.
A little more than four years ago, at the Garden of Forking paths blog, I wrote up something on the most frequently cited free will (and moral responsibility-oriented) monographs (in English) published between 1980-2005. Making use of The Google, in its then-recently launched “GoogleScholar” guise I generated a list of citation counts. Like all citation counts, these things are fallible and limited in various ways. However, citation counts do give some (imperfect) sense about which ideas have been influential, for good or ill.
So, I’ve decided to update the monograph list, partly out of curiosity about whether there have been interesting or notable changes, and if so, what that might say about the state of Ye Olde Free Will World. An even more telling list might be one that looked at journal articles and citation impact, since that's where so much of the action is in the field. My bet is some high citation figures on my list below would be much less well-represented on such a list, but that other figures would go up by a large margin.
Anyway, the observations below are something of a prelude to a forthcoming post about what counts as a position or a parameter in the literature. Before you make the jump, I invite you to ask yourself what you think the most heavily cited books are, and which books have climbed the most in citations over the past five years. After the list, I have some observations and thoughts about the details.
Recent Comments