I’ve been playing around with the data about citation patterns in top journals of recent articles, and I started to think that a lot of it was very noisy. So I was looking for ways to aggregate the data that would be revealing. I decided to look at how many times recent articles, that is articles from 2000 onwards, from different journals were cited in each of the ‘top 3’ philosophy journals – _Journal of Philosophy_, _Mind_ and _Philosophical Review_. A few disclaimers before I start.

• This data is all from Web of Knowledge, with all the problems that entails.
• The number of articles in each of the top 3 journals in the time period in question is 489 in Journal of Philosophy, 1589 in Mind, and 672 in Philosophical Review, though most of those in Mind and the Review are book reviews. (I thought previously that book reviews in Mind and the Review were treated differently by Web of Knowledge. That was a mistake.)
• I’m not including Nous in this because Web of Knowledge treats Philosophical Issues and some years of Philosophical Perspectives as special issues of Nous, and separating out those from genuine issues of Nous is too hard for me to do with any accuracy.
• The counts below are of how many articles in each of the top 3 journals cite any article from the ‘source’ journal published in 2000-2013. In practice, this undercounts how many times the top 3 journal cites the source journal, since of course an article might cite multiple articles from the 1 source.

That said, here are the data. I’ll leave commentary on the data for another time, because they are interesting enough on their own. I would be very interested in hearing in the comments for suggestions for other journals that might suitably be analysed this way.

UPDATE 7/12: I’ve added some more thoughts in a “new post”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2013/07/12/update-on-journal-to-journal-citation/.