Bibliometric Analysis of the Phenomenology Literature
Pablo Contreras Kallens, Jeff Yoshimi
Contributions to Phenomenology 2023 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-26074-2_2 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Bibliometric network analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Population | Authors who have written documents containing the word "Phenomenology" |
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Key points | The authors report that clustering an author-wise co-citation network of phenomenology writing reveals that the main areas of research since 1970 conform fairly well to an intuitive understanding of the literature, though they note some surprises. They argue that the field's vast literary output has a tractable structure amenable to bibliometric analysis. |
Abstract
Abstract: More has been written about phenomenology than could possibly be read in a single person’s lifetime, or even in several lifetimes. Despite its unwieldy size, this vast “horizon” of literary output has a tractable structure. We leverage the tools of bibliometrics to study the structure of the phenomenology literature, and test several hypotheses about it. We create an author-wise co-citation network, a graph of nodes and connections, where each node corresponds to an author who has written a document with the word “Phenomenology” in it, and where two nodes are connected if the corresponding authors have cited each other. By applying clustering algorithms and other techniques to this network, certain structural features of the field emerge. The main areas of research since 1970 conform fairly well to an intuitive understanding of the literature, though there are some surprises.