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Which journals have articles that are cited the most in the Stanford and Internet Encyclopedias of Philosophy? (UPDATED)

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 2–VARIOUS UPDATES

I know you wanted to know, and so Tadeusz Ciecierski, a philosopher at the University of Warsaw, decided to compile the data. Hard to know what to make of the results, except that older journals that publish a lot (looking at you Synthese [founded 1936, publishes more than 400 articles per year] and, to a lesser extent, Philosophical Studies [founded 1950, but publishing more than 150 articles per year]) have an advantage. (Contrast Philosophical Review, which is older, but publishes only about 40 articles per year on average.) Other observations welcome.

UPDATE: A couple of readers point out that philosopher Nat Hansen normalized the results to reflect the number of articles published and the resulting ordinal list looks a lot more sensible (apart from Philosophical Perpsectives, which is no doubt an artifact of a couple of highly cited pieces). Indeed, it’s not far off the journal polls we have run in the past. Here’s Professor Hansen’s list:

ANOTHER UPDATE (11/4/26): A reader points out that Professor Hansen recalculated his normalization with better data on the volume of articles published; here are the new results:

Apart from Philosophical Perspectives (an invitation only journal), this looks an awful lot like earlier journal surveys here. And do see this sysematic survey and meta-ranking of journals from 2022. The latter is clearly better than on-line polls like the ones run here, but its results are not that different.

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3 responses to “Which journals have articles that are cited the most in the Stanford and Internet Encyclopedias of Philosophy? (UPDATED)”

  1. Allen Hazen

    There are some errors (not surprising in something of this size!): down at the bottom of the journal list, among the journals with only one or two citations in the encyclopedias, I saw journals with titles beginning with multiple question marks (so, one person or machine couldn’t read the actual title and put in ? for unreadable letters) and at least one author of a book whose name was interpreted as a journal title.
    My suspicion is that, statistically, this sort of thing in unimportant, and that it doesn’t much affect the “ranking” of the top few hundred journals.

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  2. Brad

    Much like other similar rankings, small diferences, do not mean much – for example, Phil Quarterly’s 901 citations and Erkenntnis’ 848 citations really do not reflect much about the relative impact of the papers in these journals. But the big differences probably do reflect differences in the impact of articles published in the various journals (all else being equal).
    So people publishing in journals ranked below 500 in the list should not be so surprised that their papers are not cited often, or as often as others’ papers. Indeed, people publishing in journals outside of the top 100 should not be surprised that their papers are cited significantly less than those in the top 20.
    The skewed distribution of citations has been noted since the early 1960s (see Derek de solla Price’s Little Science, Big Science). In fact, librarians used to count journal use by the number of journals they had to reshelf. Journal use is highly skewed, with a few journals read often, and many read seldom.

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  3. Gregory C. Mayer

    One source of error I noticed are journals being listed separately after they changed their names, but nothing else (continuous volume numbering, editorial control, etc.). For example, Systematic Zoology changed to Systematic Biology, and appears separately under both names. (David Hull and Elliott Sober are among the philosophers who have published in the journal.) Neither name is a major source of citations (33 and 39), so it does not affect the overall picture, but the journal’s ranking would go from 331 and 275 to around 180. As Allen Hazen notes, this sort of thing is to be expected in such a large undertaking.

    One thing that struck me is how few of the citations are to earlier work. Out of ca. 88,000 citations in the total database (1900-2016), fully 85,000 are 1945 or later, and 63,000 from 1990 or later. This may reflect an increase in the amount of published literature, but might also reflect continued development of new and worthwhile ideas. (As opposed to the unkind interpretation of Whitehead’s remark about “footnotes to Plato”.)

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