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Accumulation of knowledge in para-scientific areas: the case of analytic philosophy
Petrovich E. Scientometrics116 (2):1123-1151,2018.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Aug 30 2019

Without an agreed-upon definition of analytic philosophy, philosophers and historians suggest viewing it as a parascience. Due to the accumulation and growth of knowledge in analytic philosophy, the author considers it an intellectual feature of this study. This paper focuses on standards of citation behavior in analytic philosophy.

The author uses Kuhn’s theory of normal science as the conceptual framework for qualitative citation context analysis. In addition, Petrovich collects journal papers from five top journals, based on a survey conducted by the Leiter Reports blog [1]: The Philosophical Review, Noûs, The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. All papers were published after the Second World War, between 1950 and 2009. Furthermore, the author selects the ten most-cited papers from each ten-year period (out of six periods), with a total number of 1293 references. Papers were selected for being widely read, widely cited, and of high quality, taking into account the impossibility of reading too many papers in this study due to the close reading approach chosen.

The author categorizes the cited references based on state-of-the-art, supporting, supplementary/perfunctory, acknowledgment, critical, documental, and unknown citations. However, he excludes books for two reasons: so as not to replicate previous studies on philosophy monographs, and because journal articles are “key outlets for disseminating research.” Specifically, Petrovich claims that this is the first study of citation context that considers temporal dimensions through the whole analysis procedure.

The paper is an interesting read for those who are working in the area of citation context, including analytic philosophers, historians, sociologists, researchers, academics, and scholars. The author confirms the claim that “analytic philosophy underwent a process of normalization ... in the last decades” by studying “patterns and specific features of the normalization process,” which makes this paper a worthwhile read.

Reviewer:  Lalit Saxena Review #: CR146677 (1912-0456)
1) Leiter, B. “The top 20 'general' philosophy journals, 2015.” Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, September 28, 2015, https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/09/the-top-20-general-philosophy-journals-2015.html.
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