Briefly bibliometric me

Sun 09 Oct 2011 01:22 PM

Today I was talking with Christy Mag Uidhir about a paper of his that was 13,000 words. With some struggle, he had brought it down to 11K. It just couldn't be any shorter without shedding important arguments!

Prior to the last year, I had never found myself in this situation. Then, last Fall, I found myself in the midst of writing a paper which was already 15K words even though I wasn't quite done with the introduction. I realized that I was not writing a paper at all, but a book. The problem was not making it short enough to hook a journal editor, but long enough to hook a publisher.

This musing prompted me to update my list of published articles by length. This is something I did back in 2007 and 2009. Without planning on it, it has become a biennial tradition.

Numbers are in thousands of words, given to two significant digits.

Italics indicate an item that's new since the last time I did this. Even ignoring the book, I do seem to be getting more verbose. This is underscored by looking ahead and including a paper which is under review: the longest article I've written by a fair margin. [strike](Since it's under review, I've redacted the title.)[/strike]

An asterisk* indicates a co-authored article. (The long one at least has that excuse.)

10. Why novel...* (under review)

8.2 Reid's defense... (2008)

8.0 On trusting... (2009)

7.8 Realist ennui...* (2005)

6.9 The Identical Rivals...* (2010)

6.9 Is there an elephant...* (2007)

6.7 Drakes, seadevils... (forthcoming)

6.7 Inductions, red herrings... (2010)

6.5 Reckoning the shape... (2005)

6.0 Historical individuals... (forthcoming)

5.9 Distributed cognition... (2007)

5.5 Demonstrative induction... (2008)

5.1 Williamson on knowledge...* (2003)

5.0 Art concept pluralism* (2011)

4.8 Miracles, trust... (2011)

4.6 Background theories... (2005)

4.4 Peirce... (2005)

4.2 The price of insisting... (2004)

3.9 Success, truth... (2003)

3.3 Un... Identical Rivals (2003)

2.9 Mag Uidhir... (2008)

2.7 Whats new... (2006)

2.6 Hormone research... (2005)

1.7 Reid's dilemma... (2004)

1.4 Philosophy of Science in the 21st.... (2010)

1.3 Early response... (2008)

UPDATE: After Matt's comment (below), I realized that I have already put the title on the web. It's listed as a paper under review on my CV. So there's no reason to be cagey about the title here.

Comments

from: Matt Brown

Tue 11 Oct 2011 12:59 PM

P.D. - Do you generally remove your papers from your website while they're under review? I usually leave mine up, but I've discovered occasionally that during review the specific title of my paper gets searched. Not sure how I feel about that. What is your thinking on this? (If it's sufficiently complicated, maybe you could do a post?)