{"id":90552,"date":"2024-07-20T03:00:40","date_gmt":"2024-07-20T07:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=90552"},"modified":"2024-07-19T17:35:47","modified_gmt":"2024-07-19T21:35:47","slug":"counting-citation-numbers-in-chomskys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/07\/20\/counting-citation-numbers-in-chomskys\/","title":{"rendered":"Counting citation numbers in “Chomskys”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest anonymous reviewer<\/a> in Astral Codex Ten<\/em>‘s “Your Book Review” series considers the work of Noam Chomsky, and notes just how his works dominate the field of linguistics:<\/p>\n

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Noam Chomsky speaks about humanity’s prospects for survival in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States on 13 April 2017.
Original photo by \u03a3, retouched by Wugapodes via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

You may have heard of a field known as “linguistics”. Linguistics is supposedly the “scientific study of language<\/a>“, but this is completely wrong. To borrow a phrase from elsewhere<\/a>, linguists are those who believe Noam Chomsky is the rightful caliph. Linguistics is what linguists study.<\/p>\n

I’m only half-joking, because Chomsky’s impact on the study of language is hard to overstate. Consider the number of times his books and papers have been cited, a crude measure of influence that we can use to get a sense of this. At the current time, his Google Scholar page<\/a> says he’s been cited over 500,000 times. That’s a lot. <\/p>\n

It isn’t atypical for a hard-working professor at a top-ranked institution to, after a career’s worth of work and many people helping them do research and write papers, have maybe 20,000 citations (= 0.04 Chomskys). Generational talents do better, but usually not by more than a factor of 5 or so. Consider a few more citation counts:<\/p>\n