Measuring the isolation of research topics in philosophy

Abstract

Various authors have recently argued that certain parts of academic philosophy are highly isolated from other fields of academic research. The central aim of this paper is to go beyond philosophical arguments, and empirically test whether this is indeed the case. More specifically, we investigate whether domains of Core Philosophy, like metaphysics and epistemology, are more isolated than Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Value Issues. To do this, we collected 2,369 WoS indexed papers divided into 17 Philpapers topics from these three kinds of philosophy, and used 11 indicators to measure their isolation. The results show that both Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Value Issues are less isolated than Core Philosophy. In addition, general topics in Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Value Issues tend to be more isolated than applied topics. These results suggest that the isolation of philosophy could be alleviated by shifting the priority from Core Philosophy to applied Philosophy of Science and Value Issues.

The public relevance of philosophy

“…We chose this data period to allow all papers to have at least three years to accumulate citations in line with previous discussions on effective citation windows (Adams 2005;Chi 2016;Glänzel 2008;Wang 2013). By using the same research topics as Chi and Conix (2021) for the altmetric analysis, we can compare the results for uptake isolation with their results for philosophy's isolation from other academic fields.…”

“…The empirical tests in the previous section suggest that philosophy is generally rather isolated, both with respect to its content and its uptake, from a broad non-academic audience. 10 Previous research shows that at least some parts of philosophy (in particular LEMM) are also highly isolated from other academic fields (Chi and Conix 2021). Taking these together, it seems that the worries about the public relevance of philosophy mentioned at the beginning of the paper should be taken seriously: at least some substantial part of philosophy is rather isolated.…”

“…Other studies have already looked at the extent to which various philosophical research topics and philosophical subfields are isolated from other philosophical research and from academia more generally (e.g., Higgins & Smith 2013;McLevey et al 2018). Most relevantly, Chi & Conix (2021) show that research in philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of mind and metaphysics (LEMM) is more isolated from other academic fields than research in philosophy of science (PoS) and value theory (VT). For example, for the research topics tested in that paper, less than 8% of the citations of LEMM papers came from outside of philosophy, while for VT this was 40% and for PoS even more than 60%.…”

“…It also suggests that disciplinary differences may play a role in uptake isolation. Papers in PoS are far more often published in science journals, and written by scientists, than papers in VT and LEMM (Chi and Conix 2021). If it is more common to communicate about one's research on social media and other online media in science than in philosophy, this would be reflected in uptake isolation but not in content isolation.…”

“…'moral expressivism' and 'truthmakers.' For the selection and identification of philosophical research topics, we relied on the work ofChi and Conix (2021), who recently compared the academic isolation of PoS, VT and LEMM by comparing citation and reference metrics of 6 PoS research topics, 6 VT topics and 5 LEMM topics. These research topics total 2,369 articles published between 2000 and 2017 and indexed in both Clarivate's Web of Science and PhilPapers (see Online resources,…”