Wednesday 11 January 2012

Graph of memetics articles on Google Scholar

Richard Dawkins proposed tracking the health of memetics by tracking citations of the idea in learned journals - in the second edition of The Selfish Gene.

I plotted such references in a 2008 article titled: Memetics death report exaggerated.

I revisited Google Scholar and made another plot today. This time I used "memetic OR memetics" as my search term, which seems to be the most reasonable thing to search for to me.

Here are the results:

As before, it is best to ignore the last couple of years: Google hasn't indexed all the papers from those years yet.

This time I also did a "control" plot: I searched for "gold":

Here's my raw data:

YearMemetics
199015
199114
199224
199328
199440
199550
199670
199793
1998187
1999264
2000303
2001408
2002538
2003648
2004819
20051010
20061220
20071460
20081800
20092020
20102580
20112570
201242
YearGold
1990 102000
1991 113000
1992 123000
1993 133000
1994 147000
1995 172000
1996 188000
1997 211000
1998 242000
1999 277000
2000 304000
2001 304000
2002 349000
2003 374000
2004 418000
2005 428000
2006 373000
2007 372000
2008 300000
2009 257000
2010 164000
2011 110000
2012 7660

Others on the internet seem to be noticing downturns in recent years too. For example, this guy appears to have concluded that we are at "peak haplotype" - on similarly flimsy evidence.

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