A Citation Based View of the Ontology Community in Philosophy

While many bibliometric techniques have been employed to represent the structure of academic research communities over the years, much of this work has been conducted on scientific fields as opposed to those in the humanities. Here we use graphing techniques to present two networks that allow us to explore the structure of a subset of the philosophy community by mapping the citations between philosophical texts on the topic of ontology (the study of what exists). We find a citation gap between philosophers studying material and abstract objects, and between analytic and continental ontologists, but other predictions were not confirmed by this method. We conclude by considering several additional methods for further exploring both the structure of philosophy and other disciplines in the humanities.