Google Scholar self-indulgence

One of the many marvelous features of Google Scholar is the way it allows one to chase citations, finding out who's been citing what paper, and so on.  A side-effect is the possibility of self-indulgence in finding out who's been citing one's own papers, across a wide variety of areas, at least in electronically available texts.  I was surprised to find that my two most-cited pieces, after The Conscious Mind and "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness", are two AI papers that I wrote as a graduate student: "Syntactic Transformations on Distributed Representations" (123 citations) and "The Evolution of Learning: An Experiment in Genetic Connectionism" (82 citations).  By contrast, most of my philosophy articles are have less than 30 citations.  The full list is here.

Comments

[David Bourget]

A possible explanation is that 1- these were published at least five or six years before your philosophy papers; 2- the time it takes for a philosophy paper to be read by half of those who will read it (its "half life") is quite long (around 25 years), and it is much shorter in computer science; 3- the number of times a paper is cited per year does not increase linearly as years increase; 4- there are considerably more people and publications in CS than in philosophy; 5- Google Scholar has done a better job at indexing CS journals than philosophy journals thus far.

-d