There is a lot more to be said about patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the Healy Four (H4), but Healy's citation data also suggest that the four most prestigious journals in the discipline may be lagging indicators. I have already hinted at this by calling attention to the reputation for slowness that at least three of the journals had during the period covered by Healy. Here's some further evidence that H4 is a lagging indicator.
Jonathan Schaffer, who is extremely widely cited, does not crack the Healy 500. Now, what makes Schaffer interesting is that he does publish in the H4 in 'core' areas of philosophy; his papers get picked up and from 2008 (or so onward) cited a lot. (He returned Stateside in 2011.) I would expect that in the next few years, Schaffer easily cracks a revised Healy 500. Now n=1 (although I have also looked at some other 'high citation, low Healy 500 impact, publishes in H4' e.g., Jonathan Hawthorne, our very own Mohan, etc.). Here's a defeasible moral: while H4 may publish cutting edge research, the citations in h4 reflect this with considerable lag.
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