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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Philosophers with Google Scholar Pages

It's interesting how they seem to be popular in some sub-fields and in some departments, but not others.  At Rutgers, Andy Egan, Barry Loewer, Branden Fitelson and Jason Stanley, among others, have pages, and so does Brian Weatherson, who used to be at Rutgers.  Other "Lemmings" types in that circle have them, such as Keith DeRose (Yale), Daniel Bonevac (Texas), Robert Koons (Texas), David Chalmers (NYU/ANU), Benj Hellie (Toronto), Tom Kelly (Princeton), and Stephen Yablo (MIT).

Relatively few senior philosophers have them, but Daniel Dennett (Tufts) and Ned Block (NYU) do, as do Block's somewhat younger colleagues Paul Boghossian and David Velleman, as well as Timothy Williamson at Oxford, Derk Pereboom at Cornell, Mark Lance at Georgetown, and Mohan Matthen at Toronto, among philosophers more-or-less in their 50s.  Besides Matthen, I didn't come across many philosophers of science with Google Scholar pages–Michael Weisberg (Penn) has one, and so too Hans Halvorson (Princeton), Andre Ariew (Missouri), and Roberta Millstein (UC Davis).  

Daniel Garber (Princeton) is one of the few philosophers working mainly in history of philosophy to have a page (maybe because historical scholarship is just cited less?).  Other philosophers working primarily in history with pages include Susanne Bobzien (Oxford) and Roger Ariew (South Florida).

And relatively few value theorists have one, though I came across David Brink (UCSD), Peter Vallentyne (Missouri), Samuel Freeman (Penn), and Mark Schroeder (USC).  I have one, though I first heard about it from law colleagues, rather than philosophy colleagues (and I was annoyed to discover one of the weaknesses of Google's automated system for compiling these–it doesn't distinguish between "and" and "on" [Nietzsche and Morality versus Nietzsche on Morality, it lumps almost all of the latter under the former]; I imagine there are other bugs in the program that affect other people's counts).

Finally, I was struck initially by the relative paucity of women, but in fact there turn out to be a fair number.  I came across Cristina Bicchieri (Penn), Jennifer Nagel (Toronto), Sarah McGrath (Princeton), Katalin Balog (Rutgers/Newark), Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown), and Berit Brogaard (Missouri/St. Louis), among others.

One interesting fact about Google citations (which only picks up cites on-line) is that any philosophers who work in fields that touch on cognitive science and linguistics do quite well because in those latter two fields scholars seem to put all their stuff on-line! [UPDATE:  Comments, below, indicate this remark was unclear.  The point is that Google Scholar uses a limited database–only stuff that makes it on-line.  I've noticed that in some fields, like linguistics, the norms for putting work on-line is very strong, more so than in other fields.  The shape of the database affects the citations, but of course, very good work is not necessarily heavily cited, and heavily cited work is not necessary the best work in a subfield!]

Other interesting Google Scholar pages?  Feel free to add them in the comments.

UPDATE:  The remarks in the last long paragraph now seem to me mistaken.  For more on Google Scholar, see here.

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9 responses to “Philosophers with Google Scholar Pages”

  1. I have one, though I have never known why. Google created it automatically when I signed up for G+ (or that is when I noticed it) but it was set to private. Perhaps others have one but have just not yet set it for public?

  2. "Daniel Garber (Princeton) is one of the few philosophers working mainly in history of philosophy to have a page (maybe because historical scholarship is just cited less?)."

    This suggests that who has a page depends on how much their work is cited. But doesn't it just depend on who has gone to the effort of setting up a page. I just set up a page. It was easy. And you have to verify your email. So it seems that everyone who has a page either set it up themselves or at least verified their email address.

    BL COMMENT: My point was only that one might not bother to create the page (and it is fairly easy to do) if there aren't a lot of citations out there–otherwise it would be depressing!

  3. Brian,

    I'm wondering what the justification for your claim that "any philosophers who work in fields that touch on cognitive science and linguistics do quite well because in those two fields scholars seem to put all their stuff on line." I'm wondering what your evidence is for this surprising claim, because as far as I can tell, it's false. It seems to me that linguistics (especially the sort that touches on philosophy, like semantics) lagged behind other disciplines in having easily accessible online work, especially on webpages. Lots of semantics seemed to be only available in obscure conference proceedings. More to the point, I just wrote up a list of ten people of different generations whose work touches on linguistics, and matched them with ten people of similar generations who do metaphysics. I'm finding that the second group more cited than the first group. Furthermore, even if you take people who work both on the border of philosophy and linguistics, and work in metaphysics (such as Graeme Forbes), their metaphysics seems to be cited more than their philosophy of language. At any rate, I'll devote about 20 more minutes to this, but right now as far as I can tell – Philofact gives this its "pants on fire" rating 😉

    BL COMMENT: One does have to compare philosophers of comparable stature, and from what you told me via e-mail,it doesn't seem you were doing that.

  4. If I'm not mistaken, Google Scholar generates a page for every author whose published work has some presence on the internet. But these pages are initially private and only become public if the author changes the privacy setting. What you are noticing is not those who have Google Scholar pages, but those who have made theirs public.

    BL COMMENT: That was not my experience, but another comment suggests that if you were already on Google+, the page may have been automatically created.

  5. Eric Winsberg (University of South Florida) is a philosopher of science with one. Bryce Huebner (Georgetown) has one. On a closely related note, I think part of the area clustering you are seeing is because groups of friends tend to make them at about the same time, after chatting about them with one another.

    They should be taken with a grain of salt. According to my google scholar page, my 'Myth, Memory, and 'Misrecognition' paper has been cited by pretty much every major philosopher of the 20th century, including many who were dead long before the article was written (Feigl, Carnap). It is even supposedly cited by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit!

  6. Brian,

    Let's not make our email exchange public, but you pointed out two cases where I wasn't comparing philosophers of similar stature, and one case in which I was comparing philosophers of similar stature, and my point still held – the philosopher working in general philosophy rather than on the overlap of philosophy and linguistics was considerably more highly cited. Many people working on the overlap between philosophy and linguistics or cog science haven't done work that linguists or cognitive scientists pay attention to, but some have. Those that do, such as Jerry Fodor, are very highly cited. But for every Jerry Fodor, there are dozens of philosophers working on the overlap of those areas whose work hasn't caught fire outside philosophy, but are highly respected philosophers. Their work seems to be less cited -often considerably less cited- than work in philosophy that doesn't overlap with cognitive science.

    BL COMMENT: In the case of the philosophers of comparable stature, having now looked at it, it seems my point still holds! One work by the philosopher of language was more cited than any work by the other philosopher–but the other philosopher had produced a lot more, so the total citatiosn for ALL work were higher.

  7. I think what's right to say is that if a philosopher works on the overlap between philosophy and X, and writes a paper that becomes influential in field X, that philosopher will typically be more cited than a philosopher who writes a paper that is only influential in philosophy. But that does not entail that in general, philosophers working on the interface of philosophy and other fields will be more highly cited.

    BL COMMENT: I agree with that, with the caveat that it matters what the X field is–some fields make more use of the Internet than others (linguistics is a case in point).

  8. Rebecca, that's pretty funny! It must be the reference to the Sellars paper in the title…

  9. "I didn't come across many philosophers of science with Google Scholar pages, …"

    One can search by labels (which the authors can assign). Ten are shown on one page, click "Next >" to see more:
    Philosophy of science: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&view_op=search_authors&mauthors=label%3Aphilosophy_of_science
    Philosophy of biology: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&view_op=search_authors&mauthors=label%3Aphilosophy_of_biology

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