Eugenio Petrovich

Università degli Studi di Siena | UNISI · Dipartimento di Economia Politica e Statistica

In this chapter, the research object of the book is introduced: the margins of the philosophical text. We show that the citations and the acknowledgments that appear on the margins of the main text, forming the so-called para-text, offer a novel perspective on philosophy. In the first part, we explain why these peculiar margins represent privileged...

Citations and acknowledgments are at the core of the empirical investigations conducted in this book. In this chapter, the main theories developed to explain the meaning and function of these two para-textual elements are presented. Against this background, the theoretical approach that underlies the empirical studies of the next sections of the bo...

This conclusive chapter discusses how the quantitative analysis of citations and acknowledgments can improve the discipline of philosophy. Then, it sketches a portrait of the Quantitative Studies of Philosophy (QSP), the new research field that this book aims to contribute to. We first advance a working hypothesis on the scope and methods of QSP. T...

In this chapter, the research object of the book is introduced: Late Analytic Philosophy, namely the period of analytic philosophy that spans from 1980 to today. In the first part of the chapter, we discuss the different meanings of analytic philosophy and we characterize it as a socio-professional entity in contemporary academia, abandoning any at...

Knowledge systems, including analytic philosophy, can be modeled as multi-layer networks comprising three layers: the semantic, the semiotic, and the social. In this chapter, we show how, by leveraging the information contained in the acknowledgments, we can successfully investigate the social layer of recent analytic philosophy. In the first part...

In this chapter, the acknowledgments that appeared in 2,075 articles published between 2005 and 2019 in the “Top Five” analytic philosophy journals are analyzed with both qualitative and quantitative techniques. After framing the acknowledgments as zones of a sui generis communication between authors and readers, which enable analytic philosophers...

By looking at the textual context that surrounds in-text citations, it is possible to reconstruct the epistemological functions that they play in the citing text. In this way, constructive or destructive epistemological operations can be traced with citation analysis. In this chapter, the technique of epistemological citation context analysis is us...

In this chapter, we investigate by different types of citation analysis the structure and dynamics of Late Analytic Philosophy in order to shed light on the processes of fragmentation and specialization. We try to answer questions such as: When did these processes begin? What is their pace? How did they carve the overall structure of the field? The...

We offer a scientometric perspective on the relationship between Philosophy and Neuroscience. More specifically, based on bibliometric analysis and on a survey shared among philosophers with an interest in neuroscience, we tackle the following three questions: (a) What is the impact of Philosophy on Neuroscience – and vice versa – as reflected in c...

Self-citations are a key topic in evaluative bibliometrics because they can artificially inflate citation-related performance indicators. Recently, self-citations defined at the largest scale, i.e., country self-citations, have started to attract the attention of researchers and policymakers. According to a recent research, in fact, the anomalous t...

In order to explore the suitability of a fine-grained classification of journal articles by exploiting multiple sources of information, articles are organized in a two-layer multiplex. The first layer conveys similarities based on the full-text of articles, and the second similarities based on cited references. The information of the two layers are...

This paper explores the possibility of classifying journal articles by exploiting multiple information sources, instead of relying on only one information source at a time. In particular, the Similarity Network Fusion (SNF) technique is used to merge the different layers of information about articles when they are organized as a multiplex network....

Self-citations are a key topic in evaluative bibliometrics because they can artificially inflate citation-related performance indicators. Recently, self-citations defined at the largest scale, i.e., country self-citations, have started to attract the attention of researchers and policymakers. According to a recent research, in fact, the anomalous t...

This paper compares Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) and Macro Agent-Based Models (MABMs) by adopting mainly a distant reading perspective. A set of 2,299 papers is retrieved from Scopus by using keywords related to MABM and DSGE domains. The interactions between the two streams of DSGE and MABM literature are explored by considerin...

Fueled by the rapid development of neuroscientific tools and techniques, some scholars consider the shift from traditional cognitive psychology toward cognitive neuroscience to be a revolution (most notably Boone and Piccinini). However, the term "revolution" in philosophy of science can easily be construed as involving a paradigm shift in the sens...

The chapter presents a topic mining approach that can used for a scholarly data analysis. The idea here is that research topics can emerge through an analysis of epistemological aspects of scholar publications that are extracted from conventional publication metadata, such as the title, the author-assigned keywords, and the abstract. As a first con...

We introduce a methodology based on averaging similarity matrices with the aim of integrating the layers of a multiplex network into a single monoplex network. Multiplex networks are adopted for modelling a wide variety of real-world frameworks, such as multi-type relations in social, economic and biological structures. More specifically, multiplex...

In the last decades, research in science mapping has delivered several powerful techniques, based on citation or textual analysis, for charting the intellectual organization of research fields. To map the social network underlying science and scholarship, by contrast, science mapping has mainly relied on one method, co-authorship analysis. This met...

The article investigates what happens when philosophy (of science) meets and begins to establish connections with two formal research methods such as game theory and network science. We use citation analysis to identify, among the articles published in Synthese and Philosophy of Science between 1985 and 2021, those that cite the specialistic litera...

Scholars in science and technology studies and bibliometricians are increasingly revealing the performative nature of bibliometric indicators. Far from being neutral technical measures, indicators such as the Impact Factor and the h-index are deeply transforming the social and epistemic structures of contemporary science. At the same time, scholars...

Two alternative accounts can be given of the information contained in the acknowledgments of academic publications. According to the mainstream normative account the acknowledgments serve to repay debts towards formal or informal collaborators. According to the strategic account, by contrast, the acknowledgments serve to increase the perceived qual...

Two alternative accounts can be given of the information contained in the acknowledgments of academic publications. According to the mainstream normative account, the acknowledgments serve to repay debts towards informal collaborators. According to the strategic account, by contrast, the acknowledgments serve to increase the perceived quality of pa...

Scholars in science and technology studies and bibliometricians are increasingly revealing the performative nature of bibliometric indicators. Far from being neutral technical measures, indicators such as the Impact Factor and the h-index are deeply transforming the social and epistemic structures of contemporary science. At the same time, scholars...

This paper reports and briefly discusses the results of two science mapping experiments we conducted in two humanities fields: analytic philosophy and human geography. In the first section, we provide a non-technical introduction to science mapping techniques, presenting the steps required to produce distance-based science maps. The two following s...

It is several years since national research evaluation systems around the globe started making use of quantitative indicators to measure the performance of researchers. Nevertheless, the effects on these systems on the behavior of the evaluated researchers are still largely unknown. For investigating this topic, we propose a new inwardness indicato...

It is several years since national research evaluation systems around the globe started making use of quantitative indicators to measure the performance of researchers. Nevertheless, the effects on these systems on the behavior of the evaluated researchers are still largely unknown. We attempt to shed light on this topic by investigating how Italia...

In this letter, I reply to two insightful remarks made by Wray on a study I recently published on Scientometrics. First, I clarify the method I used to assess the transition of Analytic Philosophy to a normal science phase, explaining in more details the epistemological role that different types of citations play. Second, I address the topic of the...

This study analyzes how accumulation of knowledge takes place in para-scientific areas, focusing on the case of Analytic Philosophy. The theoretical framework chosen for the analysis is Kuhn's theory of normal science. The methodology employed is qualitative citation context analysis. A sample of 60 papers published in leading Analytic Philosophy j...

Understanding the dynamics of knowledge in humanities: a mapping approach