Google Scholar

“Jason”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/04/using_google_sc.html writes that he approves of using Google Scholar to assess which papers are making much of an impact. This does seem like fun, and I wish I had more time to procrastinate with it. A couple of quick observations to add to what Jason said.

Here is “a largely complete list”:http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=david+lewis&num=100&btnG=Search+Scholar&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=any&as_sauthors=d-lewis&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&as_allsubj=some&as_subj=soc&hl=en&lr= of David Lewis’s presence on Google Scholar. (It leaves off ‘General Semantics’, among other papers classified as mathematics, which is widely cited.) This list really brings out how much more prominent books are than articles. By far Lewis’s three most cited pieces are (in order) _Convention_, _Counterfactuals_ and _On the Plurality of Worlds_. The most cited paper, ‘Scorekeeping in a Language Game’ has not much more than half the citations of _Convention_, and (apart from ‘General Semantics’) no other papers have even a third as many citations.

As Jason notes, some papers are highly cited because people love to tee off on them. Coincidentally, on “my citation list”:http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=brian+weatherson&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search the top run scorer is ‘Epistemic Modals in Context’.

Surprisingly, that’s also the most highly cited paper on “John Hawthorne’s list”:http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=john+hawthorne&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search, though he has a couple of books that are ahead of it (well ahead in the case of _Knowledge and Lotteries_) and several other papers published under “his old name”:http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=o%27leary+hawthorne&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search. Some of John’s papers have slipped under the radar a bit, but hopefully with their republication in his “Metaphysical Essays”:http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199291243, they will get a little more attention.

Anyway, feel free to chime in in comments with any other interesting results from “Google Scholar”:http://scholar.google.com/.

UPDATE: “This comment”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/04/using_google_sc.html#comment-65466250 by Michael Kremer in Jason’s thread is really interesting, and possibly the best researched comment ever left on a blog.