Citation characteristics of English-language monographs in philosophy

This study examines 539 references from 183 single-authored philosophy monographs, excluding collections of essays, published in 1994 and indexed by Philosophers' Index, with each reference counted as frequently as it was cited in the randomly selected citations. The citations were classified as to source type (book, article in book, journal article, manuscript, thesis), language, the gender of both citing and cited authors, the citing authors' attitudes toward the cited material, the subject correlation between citing and cited sources, and the chronology of the citations. The type of presses publishing philosophy monographs and which journals are cited are also discussed. While many contemporary philosophers consider their discipline more related to the sciences than to the humanities, their citation patterns are typically humanistic, with the bulk of citations to books rather than journal articles and the citation of much material older than 20 years. The topics studied were found to be predominantly 20th-century with an emphasis on analytic philosophy and little concern for recent trends in continental philosophy, except for feminist philosophy. A quarter of citations were to disciplines outside philosophy.