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 in dexed by Philosophers' Index, with each reference counted as frequentl y as it was cited in the randomly selected citations. The citations we re classified as to source type (book, article in book, journal articl e, 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 chronolo gy of the citations. The type of presses publishing philosophy monogra phs and which journals are cited are also discussed. While many contem porary philosophers consider their discipline more related to the scie nces than to the humanities, their citation patterns are typically hum anistic, with the bulk of citations to books rather than journal artic les and the citation of much material older than 20 years. The topics studied were found to be predominantly 20th-century with an emphasis o n analytic philosophy and little concern for recent trends in continen tal philosophy, except for feminist philosophy. A quarter of citations were to disciplines outside philosophy.