How much do philosophers publish? And how much do they cite? Anecdotes abound, but it is surely less than all the nearby sciences, surely. But I was curious about these questions regarding people roughly at my career stage – just got tenure or just about to get it.

(I once heard someone say that an h-index between 5 and 9 is normal for philosophers up for tenure.) So I looked at people employed at 27 high-status (in the PGR’s ‘top 50’) PhD granting institutions (almost all in the US) who got their PhDs from 2011 to 2016.

Loads of qualifications. Data are incomplete as some philosophers have no google scholar profile, and some no website at all. And numbers are always on the move, of course. And different fields in philosophy publish and cite far more than other fields.

And publication number, citation number, and h-index are not great measurements for impact in many sub-fields of philosophy.

And I don’t know whether this is a representative sample. You might get different numbers if you focused on the UK or Australasia, or if you looked beyond PhD granting institutions or beyond high-status programs.

Still, I was curious. And I found lots of interesting research by looking through the websites of so many gifted philosophers! Here are my half-heartedly done results.

2011: 16.6 pubs (n=10), 269 cites (10), h-index 7 (10)
2012: 14.2 pubs (n=14), 256 cites (10), h-index 6.8 (9)
2013: 17.2 pubs (n=19), 225 cites (17), h-index 7.11 (18)

2014: 15.5 pubs (n=4), 245.8 cites (4), h-index 8.5 (4)
2015: 10.9 pubs (n=10), 96 cites (10), h-index 4.67 (9)
2016: 11.48 pubs (n=10), 93 cites (9), h-index 5.33 (9)

Many were near the average of these numbers. Of the folks I counted at the 27 schools (n=60), 42 had between 50 and 400 citations.

Of the folks I counted at the 27 schools (n=60), 10 people had 421 citations or more (most of these had PhDs from 2013 or earlier). And of the 59 with an h-index I could find, 10 had an h-index of 10 and higher, and 3 had an h-index above 11.

Interestingly, just an anecdote - I got the impression with some (based on v recent papers, or stuff in progress) that their research was just coming to fruition, just about to take off.

Maybe 6-12 years post-PhD is what it takes many philosophers to hit their stride. One could look at folks with PhDs from 2006-2010, of course. But publication norms are changing, we are told, with people publishing more (perhaps just pre-TT job?).