During an exchange over my superficial sociology of European philosophy, I made the following unsupported claim: "By the way, citation metrics bear out my claim about Europe lagging the states." One of our alert readers, Jason, quite sensibly wanted more evidence on this. What I had remembered, of course, is that most citation metrics reveal that (when comparing, say, research universities) Anglophone scholars are more 'productive' and more cited than their European counterparts (with Holland doing very well). See, for example, this top-50 ranking (of universities in research in the Humanities); interestingly, when we switch to citations, Tilburg is ranked number one followed by 25 anglophone universities. (Tilburg is unusual because it has a relatively narrow range of Humanities, and is very strong in information/technology studies and philosophy, of course!) So, first, mea culpa! I apologize for misleading anybody with that particular comment. (I have lots of anecdotal evidence that projects I first encountered around 1995-2005 stateside, get peddled as innovative in Europe around 2005-2010.)
But in reflecting on Jason's challenge I did wonder if citation metrics could even track such lags. After consulting with Loet Leydesdorff and Ronald Rousseau (two world experts on these matters--Loet is also trained philosopher of science), the answer is that there is no in principle reason why one couldn't design a historical study to uncover lags. (In fact, I hope Loet will design such a project!) It is much harder to say if one could measure it in the moment; in part this difficulty is due to the fact that with such metrics one is tracking popularity, in part because most such metrics are designed to capture how a so-called research front is moving, that is, how research flows in a two year time span. (As Loet reminded me the locus classicus is by the physicist/historian of science, Derek de Solla Price, 1965). As an aside, one general problem that Humanities research has under the current citation system, is that two years is a very brief time span; most of my work only starts to get cited after two years or so. Anyway, given that diffusion of innovation is a hot topic for a lot of governments that wish to promote economic growth, we shouldn't be surprised if such metrics will be developed.
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