We've written an article based on the PhilPapers Survey of professional philosophers: What Do Philosophers Believe?. It covers the popularity of various views; correlations with age, gender, and geography; a factor analysis that tries to isolate important underlying factors; and discussion of the results of the Metasurvey, bringing out just how surprising some of the survey results are. There are various goodies along the way that haven't been previously revealed. The article is forthcoming in Philosophical Studies. We'll be submitting the final version soon, but in the meantime all comments are welcome in the article's discussion forum (see "discussion" at the bottom of the page linked above).

We are pleased to announce that PhilPapers now accepts papers in any language.

As a pilot project, the index has been enriched with a large database of Polish publication data maintained by members of the Centre for Philosophical Research. We are grateful to Paweł Grabarczyk, Katarzyna Kuś and Piotr Wilkin for their work on this project, which has been financed by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

Publications in languages other than Polish are not systematically covered at this time, but we will improve our coverage over time. For now, we are accepting submissions of individual items in other languages. We are also open to recommendations for philosophical journals in other languages that should be included in our database, especially if they have an electronic feed. If you are interested in helping to develop systematic coverage in other languages, please contact us.

Language filters are not applied by default. To activate language filters for search and email alerts ... (read more)

The PhilPapers team is pleased to announce the launch of PhilEvents, a comprehensive calendar of events in philosophy worldwide. Try it out! 
As always, we welcome any form of feedback. Please report any bugs and send your suggestions using our contact form on PhilEvents. 

The PhilPapers team is pleased to announce a new online database of job ads in philosophy: PhilJobs. The database is to cover jobs in philosophy of all types from all over the world. It is searchable in many different ways (including AOS and geographic parameters).  Search parameters can be saved and can be used to generate email alerts.  Ads from PhilJobs will soon start appearing in PhilPapers' content alerts and certain sections of the site.  Posting and viewing ads on PhilJobs is free.  David Chalmers has more details on the project here.

If you are advertising a job in philosophy, we encourage you to submit the advertisement to PhilJobs.  If you are seeking a job in philosophy, we encourage you to search for jobs on the site.  Any feedback would be welcome, either through the feedback form on the site or through posting on the PhilJobs discussion forum.

Today marks PhilPapers' second anniversary. This is a good occasion to review our progress, and to announce a new project which has just been awarded JISC funding.

PhilPapers' growth

Today PhilPapers receives about 300,000 visitors per month, or 10,000 per day. There are over 20,000 registered PhilPapers users. About 60% of registered users are faculty members or graduate students in a philosophy department.

It is not just the user base that has grown phenomenally in two years. The index of entries has grown from about 180,000 items to over 330,000 items, thanks in good part to the increasing collaboration of publishers.

Our tests indicate that our coverage of English-language professional publications in philosophy is ahead of commercial indices by many measures.  We have also received over 10,000 submissions directly from users. Those submissions, together with website harvesting and a rich
set of online tools for researchers, have made PhilPapers a unique resource for keeping up with the ... (read more)

We have just released a wealth of additional information about last year's PhilPapers Philosophical Survey. 

First, we have posted detailed results regarding correlations between answers.  This includes correlations between answers to the main philosophical questions, and also correlations between these questions and background questions such as nationality, gender, age, and other factors.

Second, we have posted an attempt at a factor analysis, isolating a number of key factors that tend to predict an individual's responses to the survey.

Third, we have made available the answers of respondents who chose to make them publicly available. The list of these respondents is here. In addition, all respondents who have PhilPapers profiles can see who among public respondents have answers most similar to their own. If you have completed the survey, your answers will now be available through your profile and you can modify them if desired.  You can also modify settings to make your answers public or&n ... (read more)

As of today, it is possible to build your personal list of favourite authors and receive notices of all their new publications through PhilPapers. This works even with authors who are not registered PhilPapers users, and you can follow your Facebook friends' work. PhilPapers Social is available from your profile. 

Some of you may have noticed new features appearing on PhilPapers in recent weeks.  These include the following:

* Archive monitoring: PhilPapers now indexes articles found on Open Access archives. We are currently monitoring about 800 archives (mostly University-wide archives). Make sure your institutional archive is listed and that PhilPapers is correctly gathering its contents.

* Expanded coverage: We are now monitoring about 50 new journals and have the ability to add many more as we receive suggestions. We've also improved our book coverage.

* Book shopping: PhilPapers now displays prices for books on Amazon Marketplace. We have built a Bargain Finder utility which allows you to view the most discounted books on Marketplace in your areas of interests.
* Improved search facilities: We've built a new search engine which provides more flexibility in advanced mode and more relevant results in basic mode. This engine has been in operation as of the 18th of September.

* Improved performance: we have new ... (read more)

The PhilPapers Survey and Metasurvey have now closed. Both had excellent response rates: 3226 individuals completed the Survey, and 727 completed the Metasurvey. Thanks again to everyone who participated.

The preliminary results can be found here:

http://philpapers.org/surveys/

This page contains basic data on answers to the Survey and the Metasurvey, broken down by population and by area of specialization. It also contains demographic data on answers to the background questions. There is also a discussion of the survey design and a highly preliminary discussion of results. In the not-too-distant future we will add more data concerning interquestion correlations, as well as correlations of answers with geography, age, and gender, and a factor analysis. There is a new discussion forum for surveys here.

We are pleased to announce the public launch of a new PhilPapers project: the Philosophical Survey.  The aim of the Philosophical Survey is to discover information about the distribution of philosophical views among professional philosophers and others.

The survey contains thirty questions, each giving a choice between 2-4 views on a philosophical issue (for example, "Analytic-synthetic distinction: Yes or no?"; "Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?"). Respondents can indicate that they accept or lean toward one of the options or can give one of a variety of "other" answers.  We have kept the questions as simple as possible, as clarification would be a never-ending process.  We will also ask for some optional background information.

We have already launched the survey by email invitation to 2000 philosophers in 100 leading departments of philosophy worldwide.  We are now opening up the survey so that anyone can take it.  We especially encourage professional philosophers and g ... (read more)

A number of new development projects for PhilPapers are described here.  Your feedback will be very useful in implementing these projects.  Please post any feedback here.

As part of the development of PhilPapers, we have created a system of editorial positions.  We aim to assign editors to all categories at the area level and below.  Editors will be given powerful tools to help us populate and maintain the categories.  Full details of the editorial system are available in the editor's manual.

We are now calling for applications for these positions.  You can apply to become editor of a category by following the relevant link at the top of the category's page (you can reach pages for the major areas from the main category page, and all the pages for subcategories from there).  The main qualification for editorship is one or more publications on the relevant topic, though we may relax that requirement for editorships for leaf categories, and the requirement may be higher for area editors.

We strongly encourage qualified philosophers to apply, whether for an entire area, a middle-level category, or for one or more leaf categories.  You will be making a real c ... (read more)

We are delighted to announce that the PhilPapers project has been awarded a grant of £200,000 by the Joint Information Systems Committee in the UK. The grant will be administered by the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, where David Bourget will be based for the next three years. Together with support from the Institute of Philosophy and the ANU Centre for Consciousness, this grant will serve to fast-track the development of ambitious new features, and will support our efforts to spread the technology which underpins PhilPapers. Many thanks to all those who supported our bid.

A new feature that we have just put online is a batch import system for bibliographies. If you have a bibliography in Endnote, BibTeX, plain text, or another format, you can now add its entries to PhilPapers. For category-specific bibliographies, you can specify a PhilPapers category to which entries should be added. This should provide a good way to help populate the PhilPapers categories, and to ... (read more)

It has been six weeks since the public launch of PhilPapers. We now have nearly 2500 registered users, and at least twice as many regular but unregistered users. The registered users who have specified affiliations are about 40% faculty, 40% graduate students, and 20% others (undergraduate, postdoc, research staff, etc).

We are continuing to debug and add new features. Thanks to your input, we have fixed various bugs pertaining to the registration process, email alerts, and RSS feeds. Along with various other minor changes, we have added three significant new features:

(1) We have restructured the category browsing system to make it clearer and easier to use. When you go to an area page, the entire category structure for that area will be displayed. When you go to subareas, you will see both the category structure for that subarea and all the items in that subarea.

(2) We now have a page for tracked personal pages, listing all of the personal pages that we monitor for new papers. Users ca ... (read more)

As of today (10am January 28, 2009, Canberra time), PhilPapers has gone public.

To our new users: welcome!  We hope that you enjoy exploring the various features of the site, outlined here.   We encourage you to create a user account, which enables numerous powerful features including personal bibliographies, content alerts, editing, and categorization. 

There are almost certainly still plenty of bugs in the site, which we encourage you to report via the bug report links on every page and the associated bug report forum.  Note that so far, the site has mainly been optimized for recent versions of Firefox and Explorer (and to a much lesser extent for Safari and Chrome), and there may well be problems using other browsers.  More generally, we encourage you to post feedback and suggestions of all sorts in the discussion forums.

Thanks to all of our beta testers over the last month or so for their very useful feedback and suggestions.  Thanks to Wolfgang Schwarz for all of his work on the sit ... (read more)

We have recently implemented four new features: entries for books and book chapters, automatic content alerts, a new categorization tool, and automatic repopulating of entries at the bottom of a page.

(1) We have downloaded a database of books in philosophy from the Library of Congress (using a combination of call-number and keyword matching), and we are currently finding associated book previews on Google Books and are adding these to the database. These books do not show up on the "recent items" page (they would overrun it), but you will see them when searching. We expect to be add around 200 books per day in coming weeks, starting with the most recent titles.

(2) We have now implemented an option for automatic "content alerts" alerting you of new items in your selected journals or your areas of interest, and of items meeting many other criteria of your choosing. Some of you will have received multiple long content alerts on the first round, due to a bug that has now been fixe ... (read more)

I just fixed the submission interface. You should no longer get a dialog full of HTML code after entering a work's title and authors.

It seems that I broke the article submission interface just before leaving. I just noticed this from Hahei, New Zealand. I will try to fix that as soon as possible.

Issues with Safari and Chrome have come up which might prevent the use of menus on the site. We would like you to try using these browsers and report what you find, but also bear in mind that you might have to use Firefox or Internet Explorer to use the site fully until these issues are fixed. Thank you all for your helpful bug reports. I will be slow to react in the next two weeks because I will be traveling, but keep posting/emailing bugs, I will attend to them when I get back.

David

Dear Beta Tester, please read this before starting to use PhilPapers.

We are almost ready for the public launch, except that there are probably many lurking bugs to fix. We would appreciate if you could let us know about anything that doesn't look right. As they say on campus here, if you see something, say something. Be particularly vigilant if you're using a Mac, because I haven't had the change to do much testing on Mac.

Please report bugs in the Bug Report Forum, through our contact form, or by email to both Dave and me (forum method preferred). Please include as much detail as possible, including the address of the page where you saw the bug. The easiest way to report a bug is to click the "Report a bug on this page" link which appears at the very top of each page. This will create a bug report in the forum with the address of the offending page and other information added automatically.

We would like to encourage you to create a profile and try all the features that come with pro ... (read more)