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Self-absorbed, yet interesting?

A bibliometric study on general jurisprudence
Piotr Bystranowski

Abstracts

Two kinds of criticism are often raised against contemporary general jurisprudence – the part of legal philosophy dealing with the most abstract questions about law. The more fundamental criticism claims that questions discussed by general jurisprudence might actually not be interesting for other scholars. The other one suspects that, as currently practiced, it suffers from self-referentiality and lack of interest in other related discourses. In this article, I attempt to test the empirical assumptions present in both claims, using bibliometric tools. First, employing co-citation analysis, I identify the set of 169 central texts in general jurisprudence within the broader network of 713 core texts in (mostly Anglophone) legal philosophy. This provides ground for the analysis of citation flows, resulting in the following conclusions: General jurisprudence, when compared to other areas of legal philosophy, is distinctively self-referential, yet it still appears to spark some interest among other scholars, in legal philosophy and elsewhere.

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  • 1 Compare a well-known passage from Dworkin criticizing legal philosophy envisions by positivists as (...)

1General jurisprudence – the part of legal philosophy dealing with the most general and abstract questions about law – is increasingly characterised in terms of stagnation, lack of progress and fixation with decades-long debates (Hershovitz 2014; Nye 2022; cf. Marmor 2019). Many have stressed the apparent isolation of this area and, as it often happens, the isolation of a research community can be manifested in two ways: in the community not being interested in the developments in the outside world as well as in it not being interesting for outsiders (Enoch 2019). And so, general jurisprudence has been accused of not being informed or taking inspiration from relevant areas of philosophy, such as metaethics (Plunkett & Shapiro 2017) or social theory (Krygier 1982; Tamanaha 2001), or not attempting to engage more with philosophical problems arising in specific areas of legal scholarship,1 while sticking to decades-old debates without noticing that they might have reached a dead end (Hershovitz 2014).

  • 2 “Hart and Dworkin may differ with regard to the best account of what’s going on when a judge exerci (...)

2On the other hand, somewhat more fundamentally, some have argued that general jurisprudence is in principle not interesting (Enoch 2019). One way in which general jurisprudence is not interesting is its putative lack of impact on first-order controversies in specific areas of law (Hershovitz 2014: 1200–1201). Unlike in ethics, where one’s position in metaethics often ‘makes a difference’ to one’s positions in normative ethics (Enoch 2019: 82), an analogical dependence is rare in the legal domain.2 Consistently with this assumption, one of the central legal philosophers of recent decades noticed that, while lawyers and judges are able to take significant interest in legal philosophy, this interest is generally directed at the philosophical reflection on specific areas of law, not at all at general jurisprudence (Dworkin 2004: 36–37). Another way to look at this putative isolation is to draw an analogy with similar yet better analysed research communities. To the extent that general jurisprudence is considered to occupy the centre of legal philosophy, it might parallel the patterns of the core of philosophy, as described by Kitcher (2011): epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language. Kitcher’s view, supported by some bibliometric evidence (Chi & Conix 2022; Higgins & Dyschkant 2014), suggested that the core of philosophy, while enjoying much prestige within the discipline, is much less likely to interact with the outside world (scholarly or otherwise) than the seemingly more peripheral areas of philosophy. Philosophy of physics, say, while not being at the centre of philosophy so-understood, is more likely to read and be read by scholars from other disciplines than contemporary metaphysics. Should we expect analogous patterns in the case of general jurisprudence?

  • 3 Similar definitions proposed in the literature: “‘[G]eneral jurisprudence’ should refer to the subs (...)

3In this paper, I do not assess the validity of arguments raised by the critics of general jurisprudence. Instead, I focus on the empirical assumption explicitly or implicitly present in these arguments, that is, the assumption of isolation of general jurisprudence from other academic discourses. Following similar studies conducted in other areas of philosophy, here I attempt to assess and analyse this putative isolation using bibliometric tools, primarily: citation analysis. However, to do that in an empirical and rigorous way, one would hope to start with some idea of what the object of study – general jurisprudence – is. While in this study my ambition is to see if there is a data-driven way of delineating an area of research that would correspond to what scholars have in mind when they discuss general jurisprudence, this still requires some vague idea of what general jurisprudence might refer to, to start with. Brian Tamanaha helpfully distinguished two quite distinct meanings of ‘general jurisprudence’, one of ‘a universally applicable theory of the nature of law’, and the other, in which general jurisprudence deals with “constructing a theoretical framework that addresses various manifestations of law around the globe” (Tamanaha 2011: 288). In principle, the conception of general jurisprudence that provides the starting point to this study is closer to the former meaning: General jurisprudence is primarily concerned with the nature of law, in the sense of identifying propositions that are necessarily true of law and explain what law is (Raz 2009: 17).3 Analysing the nature of law, general-jurisprudence scholars are likely to focus on such specific issues as: the nature of normativity of law, the concept of rules, the conceptual relation between law and morality, the nature of legal authority or legal systems, and so on. Hopefully, this sketchy definition is sufficient to get a rough idea of the main object of this study. Let any more specific delineation of general jurisprudence emerge from the data analysed in the following sections.

4As will soon become clear, the body of scholarship identified as representing general jurisprudence in this study, is a broad, diversified, and well-connected community, occupying a distinctively central position within the wider literature in legal philosophy. At the same time, general jurisprudence – as identified in this study – appears to be characteristically self-referential (it cites primarily other texts in general jurisprudence, and very rarely other work in legal philosophy, not to mention literatures from outside legal philosophy), with its central texts being predominantly older and more likely to be books (rather than journal articles). While general jurisprudence tends to be cited relatively generously by texts in other areas of legal philosophy, it is hardly noticed in broader literatures in law, philosophy, or any other academic disciplines. While this article remains agnostic with respect to the question of how such findings should affect the evaluation of the current state of general jurisprudence, it seems rather clear that the empirical assumptions frequently made by critics of general jurisprudence find some support in the data presented below.

5Anticipating a potential reaction from a critical reader, I do not claim that the central findings of this go much beyond what has been part of the folk wisdom of many, if not most, legal philosophers. Most students of legal philosophy in general, or general jurisprudence in particular, already know that these areas are, to some extent, self-absorbed or isolationist (and many such students do not see it as a problem). Even then, however, a potential contribution of this work is in providing some gradation: General jurisprudence is exceptionally self-referential and isolationist even when compared to other areas of legal philosophy.

  • 4 See the Section 7: Limitations below for further discussion.

6Let me make one final caveat before we start. Whatever evidence based on citation analysis I am going to present, I do not expect all the participants to the debate on the nature and status of general jurisprudence to find it convincing or even relevant. Take scholars who claim that general jurisprudence does not bring valuable arguments to first-order discussions in specific areas of law. Would such a statement be refuted by results showing that legal scholars or more specialized legal philosophers cite general jurisprudence at decent rates? Not necessarily, as scholarly citation patterns depend on many factors, with the actual relevance of the cited work to the citing work being merely one of them4. Furthermore, even if any given legal scholars/philosophers citing general jurisprudence think that it is relevant to their investigations, they might be simply mistaken – a possibility explicitly defended by some of the discussed critics (Enoch 2019: 83 ff.) Having such qualifications in mind, bibliometric evidence, indirect as it is, is still likely the best kind of systematic, empirical evidence we can gather in the hope of informing such debates about legal philosophy.

1 Earlier research

7Bibliometric tools, such as analysis of citation patterns or coauthorship networks, have traditionally been used in general scientometrics research. Recently, however, they have been increasingly used to address questions relevant to specific areas of academic research. Take philosophy – over the last couple of years, citation analysis tools have been used to address problems such as: the partition of philosophy into main areas of research (Noichl 2021); the visibility of philosophy of science in the sciences (Khelfaoui et al. 2021); the relative isolation of some areas of philosophy from non-philosophical literature (Chi & Conix 2022).

8To my knowledge, no attempt at using citation analysis to map research communities within legal philosophy or, even much broader, legal scholarship exists to this date. It is so despite the increasing usage of co-authorship (Hayashi 2022), hiring-and-placement (Katz et al. 2011), and acknowledgment (Nunna et al. 2023) networks in sociological analyses of the structure of legal academia and, even more strikingly, despite the already established centrality of citation networks as a research tool in empirical analyses of case law across jurisdictions (Derlén & Lindholm 2014; Fowler et al. 2007; Hitt 2016; Nunes & Hartmann 2022; Šadl & Olsen 2017; Siems 2023; Smejkalová 2020). Despite the methodological parallels, none of these studies addressed the issue central to this paper: the measurement of the degree of isolation of a given fragment of legal scholarship.

  • 5 While a citation refers to a relation in which one article cites another, a co-citation is a relati (...)

9In this project, I employ co-citation analysis5 – a tool used to measure subject similarity and intellectual connections between pairs of academic texts (Small 1973) – to identify the core of contemporary legal philosophy (i.e., a set of legal philosophical texts that are most frequently co-cited with each other) and to partition the graph representing this core into areas representing distinct areas of research and/or distinct epistemic communities in legal philosophy as well as to describe the structure of such a graph, in particular – the position of the community corresponding to general jurisprudence. Completing those tasks, which might be of some independent value, will prepare ground for addressing two main questions: first, to what extent different areas of legal philosophy, especially general jurisprudence, interact with each other and, second, which areas of legal philosophy are visible in academic literature outside this discipline.

2 Network construction

10As I intended to start this study with situating general jurisprudence within the core of legal philosophy, the necessary first step was to find a way of delineating the set of texts representing legal philosophy. There are three general (and combinable) approaches in bibliometrics to domain delineation: using ready-made classifications of science, classical information-retrieval searches, mapping and clustering (Zitt et al. 2019). The first approach, typically taking advantage of existing categorizations of journals, was not feasible here, for a number of reasons. First, none of the leading journal classifications involves a separate category for legal philosophy. Second, even if there were such a classification, I assumed that much of crucial work in legal philosophy is published outside specialist journals (crucially, in books or journals that are not indexed in the leading citation databases), so such an approach would likely result in a distorted picture of the field. For that reason, I decided to follow an eclectic approach, starting with a list of papers published in journals that are either exclusively or primarily dedicated to legal philosophy and then expanding the data set in two further steps, as I will describe in more detail below.

  • 6 See the Section 7: Limitations below.

11All the citation data used in this project come from OpenAlex, an open bibliometric database (Priem et al. 2022). Open Alex contains metadata for over 200 million scholarly works in addition to indexing authors and institutions and is an open-access alternative to proprietary bibliometric databases. OpenAlex remains less frequently used in research of the kind I conduct here than its proprietary substitutes (such as Clarivate’s Web of Science; WoS), and it presents some important limitations6, but it offers some considerable advantages in the present context. The essential feature is the breadth of its coverage. While any bibliometric analysis of legal philosophy limited to the WoS-indexed journals would present an incomplete if not biased picture, OpenAlex covers many non-WoS-indexed journals and books, which, arguably, remain an important venue for scholarly work in jurisprudence.

12The process of constructing the graph representing the core of legal philosophy, largely inspired by a methodologically similar approach applied in a different context by Truc (2022), proceeded as follows (Figure 1):

Figure 1 The graph construction process

  • 7 Here is the list: The American Journal of Jurisprudence; Analisi e Diritto; Archiwum Filozofii Praw (...)

13The first step was to collect available metadata for all articles published in journals publishing work exclusively or primarily in legal philosophy. I set a list of 19 such journals,7 including 13 published outside the English-speaking countries (as legal scholarship tends to be fragmented along national lines and parochial, any corpus restricted to texts in English would be less representative of a discipline that it is the case in other areas of academic writing). This resulted in a set of over 12,500 papers. As most of those items have not been, according to the employed database, cited even once, and were thus unlikely to play any role in the subsequent analyses, I narrowed down the data set to articles cited by at least one other document from the entire database, which resulted in a collection of 4,683 items, which I call the Specialist Journal Collection.

14Then, however, I could not limit the study to the Specialist Journal Collection, for at least two reasons. First, one might argue that the most important articles in legal philosophy are often published outside specialist journals. Philosophers of law tend to publish their work in generalist legal journals (such as student-run U.S. law reviews) on the one hand, and in less specialized philosophy journals (say, in moral or political philosophy), on the other. Furthermore, while in many areas, particularly in the sciences, the relevant scientific output is reducible to journal articles, this is not the case with legal philosophy, where books are still very much focal. Not only many contemporary discussions are based on ideas presented in seminal books published in the 1960s or 70s, but also many legal philosophical books published today have a greater impact than most journal articles published in the same time.

15For those reasons, I expanded the data set in two further steps. First, I assumed that any text that cites a significant number of items published in specialist journals in legal philosophy is likely a text in legal philosophy itself. Hence, I created a collection of papers that cite at least 6 items from the Specialist Journal Collection. The resulting Citing Collection included 923 additional items. Second, I assumed that many classical works in legal philosophy could still be missing from both collections (as they were neither published in specialist journals, nor did they cite specialist journals). To identify such classical works, I created a collection of texts cited at least 6 times in the combined Specialist Journal and Citing collections, resulting in 1,045 additional items. That collection, however, was clearly over-inclusive, as it covered many pieces that are heavily cited across different fields, thus hardly specific to legal philosophy. This was the case of some notable piece from social sciences (such as classical works in psychology by Haidt or Kahneman and Tversky or in economics by Coase), but also for some focal work in philosophy: Even though it was directly relevant to some discussions in jurisprudence, it could not be reasonably called legal even in the broadest sense (take Quine, J.L. Austin, or Searle). As such items, by definition, are heavily cited, they were likely to affect the analyses to follow. To remedy this issue, I calculated the ratio of the number of citations coming from the Specialist Journal and Citing collections to the overall number of citations for each of the classics papers. The assumption here was that papers for which a significant proportion of citations comes from the former are likely papers in legal philosophy. However, the choice of the exact threshold involves some important trade-offs. As some important works in legal philosophy are heavily cited also outside this specific area, setting the threshold too high would leave such important items (such as, say, On the Rule of Law by Tamanaha) out. Ultimately, I decided that all the items for which the said ratio was below 0.015 were to be excluded. Arbitrary as this choice was, it excluded a few important papers in legal philosophy (e.g., Substantive and Reflexive Elements in Modern Law by Teubner), while keeping some work more readily belonging to moral or political philosophy (e.g., Moral Thinking by Hare and Contractualism and utilitarianism by Scanlon). While the impact of such occasional mismatches on the analyses to follow should not be overstated, it is worth keeping in mind. All in all, the resulting Classics Collection, after exclusions, contained 888 items.

  • 8 In biblionetwork, the weight is the number of times the two items are cited together divided by the (...)

16The three collections combined (4,077 items) provided the basis for the co-citation analysis, which used all the citations that any of those texts received, according to the employed database (171,974 citations in total). The co-citation analysis was conducted using the biblionetwork package in R (Goutsmedt et al. 2021). The most important parameter set by the researcher while running the cocitation analysis is the weight threshold:8 Intuitively, the higher the threshold is, the more times two items need to be cited together (other things being equal) to be connected in the resulting co-citation graph. In practical terms, setting a high threshold tends to result in more structured graphs, at the expense of lowering the number of items included in the graph (as more items are left unconnected to any other item).

  • 9 In graph theory, a component is any part of the graph for which any pair of nodes is connected, pos (...)
  • 10 Both of the small components appeared to represent rather niche discussions in the theory of crimin (...)

17In the present context, I set the weight threshold to 6. Furthermore, to exclude items linked to only one other item—which could incorporate texts into legal philosophy communities despite being tangentially related via a potentially spurious edge—I limited the graph to items connected to at least two other items. The resulting graph consisted of 720 nodes (representing 720 texts from the combined collections) and three connected components.9 Two of those components were extremely small (four and three nodes, respectively)10 and were discarded. Thus, only the big component of the co-citation graph, consisting of 713 nodes, was retained and will be the object of the analyses to follow (Figure 2):

Figure 2 The big component of the co-citation graph. Edge thickness is proportional to the co-citation weight, as described in footnote 8. Node size is proportional to the eigenvector centrality. Gephi’s Multigravity ForceAtlas 2 was used for layout rendering. The interactive version of the graph is available at: https://anonymousb89.github.io/​legal_philo1/​app/​.

  • 11 Listed in Online Appendix.

18In order to have a benchmark against which some of the results to follow could be compared, I chose philosophy of science as a reasonable similar, although much larger, specialized area of philosophy. To construct the graph representing the core of philosophy of science, I followed the same procedure as in the case of legal philosophy, starting with a list of 17 central journals in philosophy of science, as listed in Khelfaoui et al. (2021), and applying some further numerical adjustments.11 The resulting philosophy of science graph consisted of 13,933 nodes.

3 Network interpretation

19One of the main analyses to conduct with a connected graph is to identify its distinct communities, that is, sets of nodes that are better connected to each other than they are to the rest of the graph. In the case of cocitation networks, such communities might correspond to different areas of research and/or different epistemic communities. Partitioning a graph into communities is conducted using computational algorithms, which are typically probabilistic and dependent on parameters arbitrarily set by the researcher. Here, I used the Louvain algorithm (Blondel et al. 2008) as implemented in Gephi (Bastian et al. 2009) with the default resolution, which resulted in 21 communities. The communities were rather heterogeneous in terms of their size, with a few big communities and many small ones. As the smallest communities would be hard to interpret or to conduct any meaningful analyses, I retained the 17 biggest communities (with at least 9 members) which I was able to interpret, that is, to map onto discrete areas of legal philosophical research.

  • 12 In graph analysis, eigenvector centrality measures what intuitively could be interpreted as the pre (...)

20In this interpretative process, I used two main tools. First, for each community I identified 10 texts that were most important for a given community, as measured by eigenvector centrality12. Second, for each community I identified the set of most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts of texts in a given community. To identify characteristic terms I used a classical measure used in text analysis, text frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf). Both sets of results for each community can be inspected in the Appendix.

  • 13 Throughout the article, I use ‘General jurisprudence’ (in italics) to refer to the specific communi (...)

21Let us illustrate the interpretive process by describing in more detail how I interpreted the four most extensive communities. And so, the largest community (spanning well over a fifth of the entire graph) can be interpreted as denoting ‘General jurisprudence.’ Two central figures of the twentieth-century Anglophone general jurisprudence13 – H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin – authored five out of 10 most central texts in this community and their surnames feature among the terms most characteristic for the community. Inasmuch as contemporary general jurisprudence has focused on debates surrounding legal positivism, so is the analysed community. All 10 most central texts are written either by notable advocates of positivism – Hart, John Austin, Joseph Raz – or its harshest critics – Dworkin, Lon Fuller, John Finnis. Furthermore, the terms positivism and positivist are the two terms most characteristic of the community. The remainder of the set of most characteristic terms deals primarily with exactly those concepts that we would associate with the most abstract reflection on law: judge, theory, rule, jurisprudence, interpretation.

22The next-largest community appears to deal with issues at the intersection of legal and political philosophy. Many of the authors of the most central texts are more readily labelled as political, rather than legal, philosophers (Thomas Nagel, John Rawls). One can, however, still see the legal dimension of this cluster. The most characteristic terms, even though unmistakably political, largely deal with those concepts that are relevant to law: legitimacy, democratic, neutrality, global [justice]. Some of the most prominent authors still can be reliably interpreted as legal philosophers, think of Jeremy Waldron or A. John Simmons. For these reasons, I labelled the community ‘Law and political theory.’

23The third community, labelled ‘Punishment,’ appears rather straightforward to interpret, with all ten central texts dealing with legal punishment and characteristic terms such as restorative, punishment, desert, retributive, censure, expressive. This contrasts with the next community, ‘Responsibility’ – here, again, the authors of central texts are mostly philosophers not necessarily associated with law. A closer look at their works, however, as well as at the characteristic terms (such as responsibility, ignorance, blameworthiness, luck) suffices to understand that the community deals with the theory of responsibility and other related issues at the intersection of law and moral philosophy (such as moral luck, mental states, moral ignorance, and the role of free will).

24Let me also notice that, for some smaller communities, I could not easily find one label to capture the apparent object of interest of a given cluster. In some cases, a community appeared to be concerned with two or more distinct yet intrinsically linked constructs (e.g., ‘Judicial review and constitutional rights,’ ‘War, killing, self-defence’), while at other times topics that do not appear necessarily linked were grouped together (e.g., ‘Theories of rights / Contract law,’ ‘Torts / Causation’).

4 Network analysis

25Some general observations follow from the inspection of this graph. First of all, this study does not bring us much closer to a precise delineation of legal philosophy. As we just saw, some of the analysed communities (such as Law and political theory or Responsibility) feature texts that appear to clearly belong to other areas of practical philosophy. This, however, need not necessarily be interpreted as a shortcoming of this study but rather as evidence of an intense exchange between some areas of legal philosophy and adjacent epistemic communities. What is really striking, then, is that, in contrast, we can see many communities in the analysed graph that seem distinctly pure in their legal-philosophical profile, and such is the main object of this study, General jurisprudence.

  • 14 In the context of Natural law, a striking observation is that, even though the community indeed app (...)

26Other initial observations about General jurisprudence follow. Most strikingly, while the analysed graph partition provides an otherwise fine-grained picture of the field, General jurisprudence is an outlier in terms of its size and, as it is very well-connected, there appears no obvious way of dividing it further. The two smaller communities that arguably belong to general jurisprudence, labelled Natural law and Non-positivism, are very tiny and well-connected to General jurisprudence (so that their separation from General jurisprudence might be interpreted as an accidental artifact of the community-detection algorithm rather than a reflection of a deeper separation in the real world).14 While general jurisprudence is often seen as a field defined by persisting debates and disagreements, this has not seemingly resulted in any kind of division of this area into separate epistemic communities. Notably, even representatives of some heterodox approaches to jurisprudence, such as advocates of the Critical Legal Studies movement, sit solidly in General jurisprudence rather than form a community of their own.

27All in all, this partition of the graph suggests a notion of general jurisprudence that is wider from that employed by at least some scholars. It certainly covers ‘Oxford jurisprudence’, discussions of normativity, rules, and separation of law and morals, but it also shows that all those issues paradigmatically belonging to general jurisprudence are not easily separated from such areas as legal interpretation.

28Roughly the same thing can be said about the entire graph – its partition is almost exclusively based on objects of interest rather than different perspectives or methodologies. For example, while texts written with the law & economics framework are present in the graph (most prominently with the Causation / Torts community), they do not come even close to forming a community on their own.

4.1 Centrality

29One of the main upshots of network analysis is the determination of relative importance, or centrality, of nodes within the structure of a given graph. Numerous mathematical tools have been developed to capture different aspects of such centrality, two of which are employed in this study. Eigenvector centrality (Bonacich 1987; Kleinberg 1999) assigns high centrality to nodes that have many high-centrality neighbours. In the context of social networks, eigenvector centrality corresponds to the intuition that an important individual is the one who has many direct links to other important individuals. In the present context, it expresses the idea that an important publication is one that is often co-cited with other important publications. The other centrality measure used here is betweenness centrality, which computes the proportion of the shortest paths between any pair of nodes in the graph that pass through a given node. For social networks, betweenness centrality highlights the importance of individuals who serve as ‘bridges’ and control the flow of information or other goods between otherwise distant individuals. In the present context, betweenness centrality stresses those publications that might serve as meeting points for otherwise distant areas of legal philosophy.

30Table 1 presents 10 texts with the highest eigenvector centrality and is overwhelmingly dominated by texts belonging to General jurisprudence:

Table 1 - Ten texts with the highest eigenvector centrality

#

Author,
Title

Eigenvector centrality


Community

1

Hart,
The concept of law


1.0

General jurisprudence

2

Dworkin,
Taking rights seriously


0.83

General jurisprudence

3

Dworkin,
Laws’ empire


0.83

General jurisprudence

4

Hart, Positivism and the separation of law and morals


0.76

General jurisprudence

5

Raz,
The morality of freedom


0.74

General jurisprudence

6

Finnis,
Natural law and natural rights


0.68

General jurisprudence

7

Raz,
The authority of law


0.65

General jurisprudence

8

Dworkin,
A matter of principle


0.63

General jurisprudence

9

Fuller, Positivism and fidelity to law


0.62

General jurisprudence

10

Waldron,
Law and disagreement


0.58

Judicial review and constitutional rights

31The picture gets more nuanced when we move to betweenness centrality, in which case the list of 10 central texts (Table 2) is dominated by General jurisprudence to a much lower degree:

Table 2 - Ten texts with the highest betweenness centrality

#


First author,
Title

Betweenness
centrality


Community

1

Hart,
The Concept of Law

80561

General jurisprudence

2

Rawls,
Two Concepts of Rules

49278

Punishment

3

Raz,
The Morality of Freedom

47557

General jurisprudence

4

Fischer,
Responsibility and Control

41161

Responsibility

5

Calabresi, Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability

28977

Torts / causation

6

Nagel,
The Problem of Global Justice

26757

Law and political theory

7

Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning

26609

Theory of rights / Contract law

8

Dworkin,
Taking Rights Seriously

26121

General jurisprudence

9

Hart,
Causation in the Law

22989

Torts / Causation

10

Hart, Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals

22026

General jurisprudence

32This pattern allows for the speculation that at least some publications in General jurisprudence are high-prestige mostly because they are often co-cited with other high-prestige publications in the same field rather than because of their links to other communities. Nevertheless, when we look at both measures of centrality averaged across communities (Table 3), we can see General jurisprudence excelling at both, although with a visibly smaller lead over the other communities in the case of betweenness centrality:

Table 3 - Ten communities with the highest average eigenvector centrality


#


Community


N


year

Eigenvector centrality

Betweenness centrality

1

General

jurisprudence

169

1989

0.17

1495.91

2

Judicial review and constitutional rights

52

2001

0.11

410.15

3

Theory of rights / Contract law

41

1987

0.07

1173.80

4

Law and political theory

83

1998

0.06

707.10

5

Non-positivism

(Alexy & Radbruch)

13

2003

0.05

218.38

6

Torts / Causation

46

1985

0.05

1356.22

7

Legal reasoning

27

1986

0.04

288.15

8

Punishment

66

1990

0.04

1344.86

9

Natural law

14

1995

0.03

202.79

10

Responsibility

60

2004

0.03

1242.25

4.1.1 Centrality vs. age and type of publication

33A critic of general jurisprudence might argue that the centrality of the corresponding community, described above, is just an effect of the centrality of a few old books, written by Hart, Fuller, Dworkin, Raz and others, rather than a reflection of the importance of any contemporary discussions in this area. If this assumption is correct and, indeed, characteristic of general jurisprudence, we should be able to observe that older items and books are associated with a relatively larger eigenvector centrality within General jurisprudence than elsewhere. Hence, I fitted a number of linear models predicting the eigenvector centrality of nodes (Table 4):

Table 4 - Analysis of variance (type II) of the model predicting eigenvector centrality

Term

sumsq

df

F statistic

p value

Publication year

0.68

1

72.34

<.001

Community

1.30

2

68.55

<.001

Type of publication

0.58

2

30.78

<.001

Publication year × Community

0.27

1

28.35

<.001

Publication year × Type of publication

0.02

1

2.58

0.11

Community × Type of publication

0.18

1

18.92

<.001

Publication year × Community
× Type of publication

0.02

1

1.60

0.21

Residuals

6.33

669

34The first three rows of the table show us that the addition of each of the simple effect improves the model’s fit. And so, the simple effect of publication year suggests that across the graph the older a given item is, the higher is its eigenvector centrality, other things equal (which is not particularly surprising, given that older texts are normally more likely to have amassed a larger number of co-citations). Second, the observed simple effect of Community (which is a binary variable indicating whether a given node belongs to General jurisprudence or not) confirms that nodes belonging to General jurisprudence have, on average, a higher eigenvector centrality. Finally, the simple effect of Type of publication (whether a given document is a book or other kind of publication) shows that, across the graph, books enjoy higher eigenvector centrality. The most interesting part of this analysis, however, is the one where interactions between Community and the other two predictors are shown to improve the model’s fit. The direction of these interactions is consistent with the critics’ predictions, mentioned above. And so, the interaction between Community and Publication year (see Figure 3) suggests that older texts are distinctively central within General jurisprudence when compared to other communities:

Figure 3 - Interaction between Publication year and Community in the model predicting eigenvector centrality

35Similarly, the interaction between Community and Type of publication (Figure 4) provides evidence that the trend of the relatively greater centrality of books is particularly pronounced for General jurisprudence:

Figure 4 - Interaction between Type of publication and Community in the model predicting eigenvector centrality

36To put both findings into context, I compare them to analogical patterns observed for the philosophy of science graph. There, the older texts are also more central, but the correlation between the year of publication and eigenvector centrality (Pearson’s r = -0.06, 95% CIs: [-0.07, -0.04]) is much weaker than in the case of the entire legal philosophy graph (Pearson’s r = -0.28, 95% CIs: [-0.35, -0.21]), or the General jurisprudence community (Pearson’s r = -0.35, 95% CIs: [-0.48, -0.21]).

37Similarly, books in the philosophy of science graph are more central than other kinds of publications, but the difference (Cohen’s d =0.33, 95% CIs: [0.27, 0.38]) is much weaker than in the case of the entire legal philosophy graph (Cohen’s d = 0.48, 95% CIs: [0.31, 0.66]) or the General jurisprudence community (Cohen’s d = 0.53, 95% CIs: [0.2, 0.86]) is much weaker than in the case of legal philosophy.

5 Citation flows

38So far, I have made some observations about the structure of the graph of legal philosophy and the community of General jurisprudence, including the centrality of the latter within the graph. To address directly the questions with which this study started, regarding the degree of isolation of general jurisprudence from other scholarly areas, I will use primarily the tools of citation flow analysis. Notice that co-citation analysis, on which I have been building this study so far, does not measure any direct engagement between texts – if two texts are connected in a co-citation graph, it means only that they are cited together by other texts and not necessarily that one of them cites the other. Citation analysis, to which I move now, is supposed to measure exactly such a direct engagement of one text with another. I will proceed in two steps. In the first one, I will analyse the flows within the graph, to (indirectly) check the extent the various communities identified within the core of legal philosophy borrow ideas from each other. In the second step, I will analyse the extent to which those communities are cited by various research disciplines outside the core of legal philosophy, as identified in this study.

5.1 Citations within the graph

39Table 5 presents the mean number of citations that go to a given community from other communities in the analysed graph (i.e., the total number of such citations divided by the number of texts in a given communities) as well as the ratio of that number to the total number of within-graph citations from a given community (i.e., including both those to other communities and to the community itself):

Table 5 - Communities ordered by the ratio of the mean number of citations from other communities in the graph to the mean total number of citations from all works in the graph


#


Community

Mean # of citations from other communities (A)

Mean # of all citations from the graph (B)


Ratio (A/B)

1

Justifications and excuses

1.74

1.95

0.89

2

Theory of rights / Contract law

1.06

1.63

0.65

3

General jurisprudence

1.14

2.06

0.55

4

Law and political theory

0.75

1.39

0.54

5

Self-defence / War / Killing

1.21

2.26

0.53

6

Risk and prevention in criminal law

0.75

1.50

0.50

7

Consent

0.43

1.71

0.25

8

Non-positivism (Alexy & Radbruch)

0.43

1.71

0.25

9

Torts / Causation

0.37

1.57

0.24

10

Legal reasoning

0.44

1.88

0.23

11

Sovereignty / Pluralism

0.43

1.93

0.22

12

Responsibility

0.44

2.22

0.20

13

Evidence and proof

0.22

1.33

0.17

14

Judicial review and constitutional rights

0.25

1.43

0.17

15

Punishment

0.38

2.72

0.14

16

Hate speech

0.00

1.57

0.00

17

Natural law

0.00

1.00

0.00

  • 15 It is also worth noting that the two communities with a larger value of this statistic are an order (...)

40For example, the first row informs us that a text belonging to Justifications and excuses has been, on average, cited 1.74 times by texts belonging to other communities within the graph, compared to 1.95 within-graph citations overall (that is, including citations coming from the community itself). This implies the ratio of 89% within-graph citations to Justifications and excuses coming from other communities. General jurisprudence features among the communities with highest ratio, with over a half of all incoming within-graph citations coming from other communities. Furthermore, the average number of incoming within-graph outside-community citations for General jurisprudence (1.06) is the third largest.15 Both observations imply that a substantial rate of citations to general jurisprudence comes from other areas of legal philosophy.

41Table 6, in contrast, presents the mean number of citations from a given community to other communities and the ratio of that number to the total number of outgoing in-graph citations from a given community:

Table 6 - Communities ordered by the ratio of the mean number of citations to other communities in the graph to the mean total number of citations from all works in the graph


#


Community

Mean # of citations to other communities (C)

Mean # of all citations to the graph (D)


Ratio (C/D)

1

Non-positivism

(Alexy & Radbruch)

7.00

8.80

0.80

2

Justifications and excuses

1.17

1.83

0.64

3

Risk and prevention in criminal law

2.00

3.50

0.57

4

Law and political theory

1.27

2.32

0.55

5

Natural law

0.67

1.33

0.50

6

Judicial review and constitutional rights

5.17

10.67

0.48

7

Punishment

3.32

8.26

0.40

8

Responsibility

2.00

5.84

0.34

9

Torts / Causation

4.00

12.40

0.32

10

Hate speech

2.50

8.00

0.31

11

Legal reasoning

1.00

3.30

0.30

12

Evidence and proof

0.80

2.80

0.29

13

Sovereignty / Pluralism

1.17

4.67

0.25

14

Theory of rights / Contract law

0.60

2.80

0.21

15

Self-defence / War / Killing

0.44

2.67

0.17

16

General jurisprudence

0.71

4.43

0.16

17

Consent

0.00

2.25

0.00

42If we order the list by this ratio, this time we find General jurisprudence close to the bottom. Only 16% of in-graph references of General jurisprudence go to other communities. The mean count of such references for General jurisprudence (0.71) is the third-lowest. General jurisprudence appears distinctively uninterested in other areas of legal philosophy.

43We can further corroborate both sets of observations by subtracting the mean number of outgoing citations from the mean number of incoming citations for each community (Table 7), thus obtaining a net citation flow for each community:

Table 7 - Communities ordered by the difference between the mean number of citations from other communities and the mean number of citations to other communities


#


Community

Mean # of citations from other communities (A)

Mean # of citations to other communities (C)


Difference (A-C)

1

Self-defence / War /

Killing

1.21

0.44

0.77

2

Justifications and

excuses

1.74

1.17

0.57

3

Theory of rights /

Contract law

1.06

0.60

0.46

4

Consent

0.43

0.00

0.43

5

General jurisprudence

1.14

0.71

0.43

6

Law and political theory

0.75

1.27

-0.52

7

Legal reasoning

0.44

1.00

-0.56

8

Evidence and proof

0.22

0.80

-0.58

9

Natural law

0.00

0.67

-0.67

10

Sovereignty /

Pluralism

0.43

1.17

-0.74

11

Risk and prevention in

criminal law

0.75

2.00

-1.25

12

Responsibility

0.44

2.00

-1.56

13

Hate speech

0.00

2.50

-2.50

14

Punishment

0.38

3.32

-2.94

15

Torts / Causation

0.37

4.00

-3.63

16

Judicial review and constitutional rights

0.25

5.17

-4.92

17

Non-positivism (Alexy & Radbruch)

0.43

7.00

-6.57

44The number for General jurisprudence is positive, again illustrating the thesis that, within legal philosophy, others cite general jurisprudence much more than general jurisprudence cites others.

5.2 Citations from or to outside the graph

  • 16 The NSF classification is frequently employed in similar studies. One of its advantages over the co (...)

45In the second part of the citation analysis, I analysed the set of all incoming citations to works belonging to the analysed graph for which the citation source could be matched with the National Science Foundation three-level classification of journals into academic disciplines.16 Table 8 presents the median number of citations from NSF categories to articles in a given community:

Table 8 - Median number of citations from a given discipline to an article in a given community

Discipline




Community


Phil.


Law

Other Soc. Sci.

Pol. Sci & Publ. Adm.


Psy.


Health

Other Hum.


Econ.


Comp.


Man.

Other NSE


Crim.

Other Prof. Fields

General jurisprudence

2.0

4.0

1.0

0.0

0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0

0

0

0

Law & political theory

11.0

1.5

4.0

4.0

0

1.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0

0

0

0

Punishment

4.5

3.0

1.0

0.0

0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0

0

1

0

Responsibility

28.0

1.0

1.0

0.0

1

2.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0

0

0

0

Jud. review & const. rights

0.0

8.0

1.0

1.0

0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0

0

0

0

Torts / Causation

4.5

3.0

1.0

0.0

0

1.0

0.5

0.0

0.0

1

1

0

0

Theory of rights / Contract law

9.0

6.0

3.0

1.0

0

1.0

0.0

1.0

0.0

2

0

0

0

Justifications and excuses

2.0

2.0

0.0

0.0

0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0

0

0

0

Self-defence / War / Killing

14.5

1.0

1.0

0.5

0

1.5

1.0

0.0

0.0

0

0

0

0

Legal reasoning

5.0

1.0

0.0

0.0

0

0.0

0.0

0.0

9.0

0

1

0

0

Sovereignty /

Pluralism

1.5

10.0

5.5

5.0

0

0.0

1.0

0.5

0.0

0

0

1

0

Evidence and proof

9.0

2.0

1.0

0.0

0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0

0

0

0

Natural law

2.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0

0.0

1.5

0.0

0.0

0

0

0

0

Non- positivism (Alexy & Radbruch)

1.0

1.0

0.0

0.0

0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0

0

0

0

Hate speech

10.0

1.0

2.5

2.0

1

1.0

1.0

0.0

0.5

0

0

0

3

Consent

11.0

2.0

1.0

0.0

2

2.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0

0

1

1

Risk & prevention in crim. law

1.0

5.0

3.0

0.0

0

1.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

0

0

11

0

  • 17 I use median rather than means in the present context due to the extreme right-skewedness of the da (...)
  • 18 A potential alternative explanation of this pattern is the large size and resulting heterogeneity o (...)
  • 19 I do not compare the median values across categories, as, due to a potentially unequal coverage of (...)

46As could be expected, a typical article belonging to General jurisprudence is likely to be noticed in Law and Philosophy. However, the null median17 numbers of citations from other analysed NSF categories (aside from Political Science and Public Administration) indicates a lack of interest in general jurisprudence from other fields.18 A closer look at the table, though, indicates that even the patterns of citations from Law and Philosophy to General jurisprudence are more complicated. The median number of citations from Philosophy (2) puts General jurisprudence only in 11th place among 17 communities, which implies that articles in Philosophy journals cite general jurisprudence rarely, compared to other areas of legal philosophy. The same statistic regarding citations from Law (4) puts it in 5th place, thus indicating a relatively high rate of citations received from Law journals. Consistently with these results, the ratio19 of the median number of citations from Law to the median number of citations from Philosophy (2) puts General jurisprudence in 4th place, which shows a relative overrepresentation of Law in the distribution of received citations To put these numbers into more context, one can compare them with the median number of citations a text belonging to the reference philosophy of science graph receives from Philosophy (6) or from Social Sciences (6) and Natural Sciences and Engineering (2) – both of the latter can be considered analogues of Law.

47What I said in the previous paragraph suggests that General jurisprudence is characteristically frequently cited by Law. This is right, yet General jurisprudence comes only fifth in terms of the median number of citations from Law, and when we compare its value of this statistic (4) to the leaders (Sovereignty / Pluralism – 10; Judicial review and constitutional rights – 8; Theory of rights / Contract law – 6), we see a significant gap. Overall, general jurisprudence seems to be read by legal scholars, yet it might be far from the areas of legal philosophy that legal scholars cite most eagerly.

  • 20 To limit the effect 6of citations of extreme ages (many of which appear a result of database errors (...)

48Recall my earlier analyses addressing the question of whether the interest in general jurisprudence if focused on a bunch of older books rather than more recent discussions. In the present context, if that assumption is right, we would expect citations to General jurisprudence to target older texts than in the case of citations to other communities. To check it, I calculated the age of all external citations by subtracting the publication year of the cited document from the publication year of the citing document.20 In this sense, the citations to General jurisprudence are indeed older (M = 28.52 years) than citations to other communities (M = 20.65 years; t(39527.59) = 60.45, p < 0.001). This general observation holds true for citations coming from journals classified as Law (MGJ = 26.84 years; MnonGJ = 19.79 years; t(2220.4) = 10.23, p < 0.001) and Philosophy (MGJ = 20.15 years; MnonGJ = 18.04 years; t(1166.06) = 4.16, p < 0.001). The difference is similar when we compare the age of citations to General jurisprudence to that of citations to the reference class of philosophy of science (MPoS = 20.88 years; t(2.807425 x 104) = 64.13, p < 0.001).

49Moving to the final citation analysis, let us take a look at the flow of citations from the graph to documents outside the graph (Table 9):

Table 9 - Median number of citations to a given discipline from an article in a given community

Discipline



Community


Philosophy


Law

Other Soc. Sci.

Pol. Sci. & Pub. Adm.


Crim.


Comp.

General jurisprudence

1.0

1

0.0

0

0

0

Law & political theory

2.0

0

0.0

0

0

0

Punishment

1.0

2

0.0

0

0

0

Responsibility

3.5

0

0.0

0

0

0

Jud. review & const. rights

1.0

4

0.0

0

0

0

Torts / Causation

3.0

0

0.5

0

0

0

Theory of rights / Contract law

2.0

1

0.0

0

0

0

Justifications & excuses

2.0

2

0.0

0

0

0

Self-defence / War / Killing

3.0

0

0.0

0

0

0

Legal reasoning

0.0

0

0.0

0

0

4

Sovereignty / Pluralism

0.0

14

12.0

2

0

0

Evidence and proof

3.0

3

0.0

0

0

0

Natural law

1.0

0

0.0

0

0

0

Non-positivism (Alexy & Radbruch)

1.0

2

0.0

0

0

0

Hate speech

5.0

1

0.0

1

0

0

Consent

0.0

2

0.0

0

0

0

Risk & prevention in crim. law

2.0

5

1.0

0

3

0

50A typical text belonging to General jurisprudence cites one article from Philosophy and one article from Law (and no articles from other categories). In terms of the number of citations, it gives General jurisprudence the 10th place (along four other communities) for Philosophy and the 9th place (along three other communities) for Law. Once again, to compare it to analogical number for the philosophy of science graph, the number of references to Philosophy is 4, to Social Sciences 3, and to Natural Sciences and Engineering is 3 there.

51Just like for incoming citations, the average age of citation outgoing from General jurisprudence (M = 16.84 years) is larger than that of other communities (M = 14.27 years; t(485) = 3.28, p = 0.001). This general observation holds true for citations to journals classified as Law (MGJ = 23.37 years; MnonGJ = 18.15 years; t(76.79) = 2.14, p = 0.036), while the same observed difference for Philosophy is not statistically significant (MGJ = 17.53 years; MnonGJ = 15.21 years; t(120.91)= 1.58, p = 0.12). Interestingly, the age of citations outgoing from philosophy of science (M = 17.74 years) is roughly the same as for General jurisprudence (t(398.89) = -1.21, p = 0.23). To sum up, documents belonging to General jurisprudence cite rather few sources from outside the core of legal philosophy and the sources they do cite tend to be older than they are elsewhere in legal philosophy – both observations are consistent with the thesis of the particular self-referentiality of general jurisprudence.

6 General discussion

52To what extent can bibliometric analyses bring us closer to understanding the elusive and controversial status of the arguably most central part of legal philosophy? To what extent would such analyses be consistent with the charges that critics raise against general jurisprudence in its current shape?

53In this study, I started with a combination of (co-)citation methods in order to identify a community of texts corresponding to general jurisprudence within a broader class of the core of legal philosophy. The first glance at that community appears to contradict at least some points raised by critics. General jurisprudence is a broad church. While it is often defined in terms of obscure discussions on legal positivism, the nature of normativity or rules and rule-following – and, indeed, we can see that these discussions are central to the analysed community – the epistemic community of general jurisprudence appears to extend much further. It is not easily separable from discourses of a much more direct relevance to legal practice: legal interpretation, rule of law, judicial decision-making. We can also see from the analysed graph that General jurisprudence is closely connected to other communities whose relevance for the outside world is even clearer: Judicial review and constitutional rights or Theory of rights / Contract law. All these observations do not square with a radical picture in which general jurisprudence consists of a tiny group of scholars fixated with obscure and irrelevant problems, occupying prestigious, yet isolated, ivory towers.

  • 21 See Section 7: Limitations.

54Furthermore, to the extent that general jurisprudence is traditionally seen through the lens of deep theoretical disagreements, I do not find evidence suggesting that such disagreements result in the emergence of separate, parallel epistemic communities. The generally well-connected community of General jurisprudence, while certainly keeping legal positivists at its centre, provides much space to natural law, various flavours of anti-positivism, legal realism, Critical Legal Studies, and so on. The only obvious limitation of the analysed community (although it is one that it shares with the rest of the graph) is its almost absolute restriction to Anglophone scholarship. Whatever work of authors not writing primarily in English appears in this community (and we can see some work by Hans Kelsen and, in less prominent places, by Alf Ross, Robert Alexy, Eugenio Bulygin, Jerzy Wróblewski, Aleksander Peczenik), these are almost entirely English translations of texts originally written in other languages. To what extent this observation reflects the actual dominance of authors writing in English on general jurisprudence and broader legal philosophy is a question that cannot be conclusively answered here.21

  • 22 Seeing this pattern of results as evidence of fixation with old debates is of course just one possi (...)

55If one agrees with these preliminary observations, then it is particularly striking how later analyses show that general jurisprudence – understood along these very inclusive lines – still exhibits patterns consistent with its harshest critics’ suspicions. For one, such critics often accuse general jurisprudence of a fixation with decades-old debates between positivists and their opponents, where old texts, primarily books, remain the main point of reference. And, indeed, we saw that older texts and books are much more central in General jurisprudence than in other analysed communities.22 Perhaps even more worryingly, we saw that incoming citations from outside the core of legal philosophy tend to be much ‘older’ in the case of those targeting General jurisprudence, allowing one to speculate that outsiders tend simply to ignore any contemporary discussions in general jurisprudence.

56I also found much evidence of the general jurisprudence’s self-absorption. Texts belonging to General jurisprudence are particularly unlikely to cite other parts of legal philosophy, they cite relatively little from journals in Law or Philosophy, and they basically do not cite anything else. On the other hand, we see that they tend to receive a fair amount of interest from other areas of legal philosophy as well as from journals in Law and Philosophy (keeping in mind the important caveat about those citations pointing rather to older pieces). Unlike some other areas of legal philosophy, it seems that general jurisprudence is not interesting (at least to the extent that such intereest would be reflected in citation counts) for anybody outside law, philosophy, and political science.

7 Limitations

  • 23 Such a pattern can be a result of a relatively smaller completeness of data for non-Anglophone jour (...)

57As argued by Verbeek et al. (2002), the reliability of any bibliometric analysis can be affected by a few types of factors, including completeness of bibliometric data, coverage of scientific-literature databases, and limitations to the use of citations. In the context of this study, the first two types of factors are worth discussing together. Although some proprietary citation databases, such as Web of Science, are more standardly used for this kind of research, they were not useful for this study precisely because of the coverage issues. First, many journals important for legal philosophy are not indexed in the leading dabatases and, second, much legal philosophy has been published outside journals altogether, in books and edited volumes. I addressed the coverage issues by employing the OpenAlex database, which is supposed to provide citation data more indiscriminately across journals and books. This wider coverage, however, comes at the price of some incompleteness, most notably in the form of not reporting reference lists for some articles. While incomplete data might be not dangerous for projects analysis large data sets, it is much more concerning for studies analysing smaller corpora (Verbeek et al., 2002), such as this one. This would be particularly concerning if the bias were not randomly distributed, as I have some reason to believe in this case. For example, among 19 specialist journals with which I started data collection for this study, the 6 journals publishing exclusively in English have a lower rate of published items with no references in the used database (0.73) than the remaining 13 journals (0.78; 55.58, p < .001). Even though this observation is not conclusive evidence of the database bias,23, it might cast doubt on the reliability of some reported patterns. Most strikingly, the fact that the analysed graph consists almost exclusively of texts written in English might be evidence of the core of contemporary legal philosophy being written English (because of the centrality of Anglophone philosophers and/or because of English being the lingua franca among non-Anglophone philosophers), but it can also (to some extent) be an artifact of a relatively weaker completeness of non-Anglophone data. Only further research could estimate the relative contributions of these two potential factors.

58As argued by Smith (1981), a typical citation analysis is based on a couple of rather strong assumptions, unlikely to be fully satisfied: the cited document has been used by the citing author; the citation reflects the merit of the cited document; citations are made to the best possible work; the cited document is relevant to the citing document. While the problematic plausibility of these assumptions permeates the entire field of citation analysis, let me mention a reason for caution more specific for this study. Many earlier analyses, including the central co-citation analysis, are based on citations coming not necessarily from papers written by legal philosophers. Citations coming from non-experts might be speculated to be relatively less reliable, as they might be less likely to indicate an actual engagement with the cited work and more likely to be a perfunctory reference to a high-prestige source. To give an example, the high centrality of works in General jurisprudence, such as Hart’s The Concept of Law, might be a result of non-expert authors simply adding some of the most famous bits of legal philosophy to their reference lists, without any deeper specific reason. While this risk should not be overstated, it would ideally be addressed by further research, including taking a closer look at articles citing works in legal philosophy identified as central in this study.

8 Conclusion

59Critics of general jurisprudence often claim it is self-absorbed and not interesting. In this article, I argue that such criticisms often make an empirical assumption: that general jurisprudence constitutes a body of literature that is relatively isolated from other areas of academic discourse. The (co-)citation analysis I conducted provides at least partial support to this assumption. General jurisprudence definitely appears self-referential. The analysis of citations received by general jurisprudence paints a more nuanced picture: It is cited by outsiders to some extent, although these citations are strikingly focused on older, classical books. This part of the study would best be accompanied a follow-up, of a more qualitative nature, taking a closer look the citations that General jurisprudence receives. This task, however, is left for another piece.

60Let me once again stress that, while I think the data presented lend support to the empirical assumption made by critics of general jurisprudence, it does not follow that the critics’ arguments are valid. Defenders of general jurisprudence might argue that, even if contemporary general jurisprudence is not particularly engaged with other areas of academic discourse, it does not mean it is not interesting or valuable. I can only hope that such defenders still find the data presented here interesting for other reasons.

Appendix

61This Appendix presents 10 most characteristic terms (tf-idf) from titles and abstracts and 10 most eigenvector central works for each community:

A1 Top terms and works in General jurisprudence

Terms A1 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in General jurisprudence (tf-idf)

Works A1 - Most eigenvector central works in General jurisprudence (N = 169)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Herbert LA Hart

The Concept of Law

1.00

2

Ronald Dworkin

Law's Empire

0.92

3

Herbert LA Hart

Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals y

0.88

4

Ronald Dworkin

Taking Rights Seriously

0.86

5

Joseph Raz

The Authority of Law

0.85

6

Lon L. Fuller

Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals

0.82

7

John Finnis

Natural Law and Natural Rights

0.80

8

Joseph Raz

Practical Reason and Norms

0.71

9

Ronald Dworkin

A Matter of Principle

0.70

10

John Austin

The Province of Jurisprudence Determined

0.69

A2 Top terms and works in Law and political theory

Terms A2 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Law and political theory (tf-idf)

Works A2 - Most eigenvector central works in Law and political theory (N = 83)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Thomas Nagel

The Problem of Global Justice

1.00

2

John Rawls

The Idea of Public Reason Revisited

0.96

3

Jeremy Waldron

Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism

0.91

4

John Rawls

Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory

0.80

5

Charles Larmore

The Moral Basis of Political Liberalism

0.76

6

Jonathan Quong

Liberalism without Perfection

0.73

7

A. John Simmons

Justification and Legitimacy

0.72

8

Thomas Christiano

The Constitution of Equality

0.70

9

Ronald Allen Buchanan

Political Legitimacy and Democracy

0.69

10

Robert B. Thigpen

Liberalism, Community, and Culture

0.68

A3 Top terms and works in Punishment

Terms A3 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Punishment (tf-idf)

Works A3 - Most eigenvector central works in Punishment (N = 66)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Herbert Morris

Persons and Punishment

1.00

2

John Rawls

Two Concepts of Rules

0.94

3

Joel Feinberg

The Expressive Function of Punishment

0.91

4

David Dolinko

Some Thoughts About Retributivism

0.77

5

John Cottingham

Varieties of Retribution

0.69

6

Richard Burgh

Do the Guilty Deserve Punishment?

0.69

7

Herbert LA Hart

Punishment and responsibility

0.63

8

Igor Primoratz

Punishment as Language

0.62

9

Richard Dagger

Playing Fair with Punishment

0.60

10

Michael Davis

How to Make the Punishment Fit the Crime

0.59

A4 Top terms and works in Responsibility

Terms A4 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Responsibility (tf-idf)

Works A4 - Most eigenvector central works in Responsibility (N = 60)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

John Martin Fisher

Responsibility and Control

1.00

2

Thomas M. Scanlon

Moral Dimensions

0.89

3

Angela M. Smith

Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life

0.86

4

Derk Pereboom

Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life

0.86

5

Derk Pereboom

Living without Free Will

0.83

6

Neil Levy

Hard Luck

0.80

7

Galen Strawson

The impossibility of moral responsibility

0.77

8

Daviod Shoemaker

Responsibility from the Margins

0.75

9

Michael McKenna

Conversation and Responsibility

0.74

10

Manuel Vargas

The Trouble with Tracing

0.71

A5 Top terms and works in Judicial review and constitutional rights

Terms A5 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Judicial review and constitutional rights (tf-idf)

Works A5 - Most eigenvector central works in Judicial review and constitutional rights (N = 52)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Jeremy Waldron

The Core of the Case against Judicial Review

1.00

2

Robert Alexy

A Theory of Constitutional Rights

0.86

3

J Rivers

Proportionality and Variable Intensity of Review

0.78

4

Jeremy Waldron

Law and Disagreement

0.70

5

Stavros Tsakyrakis

Proportionality: An assault on human rights?

0.70

6

David M. Beatty

The Ultimate Rule of Law

0.69

7

Lon L. Fuller

The Forms and Limits of Adjudication

0.67

8

T. Alexander Aleinikoff

Constitutional Law in the Age of Balancing

0.65

9

Michael Boudin

Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review

0.64

10

Aileen Kavanagh

Constitutional Review under the UK Human Rights Act

0.59

A6 Top terms and works in Torts / Causation

Terms A6 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Torts / Causation (tf-idf)

Works A6 - Most eigenvector central works in Torts / causation (N = 46)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Herbert LA Hart

Causation in the Law

1.00

2

Richard W. Wright

Causation in Tort Law

0.92

3

Richard A. Epstein

A Theory of Strict Liability

0.91

4

Steven Shavell

An Analysis of Causation and the Scope of Liability in the Law of Torts

0.90

5

Wex S. Malone

Ruminations on Cause−in−Fact

0.89

6

Richard W. Wright

Actual Causation vs. Probabilistic Linkage: The Bane of Economic Analysis

0.87

7

Joseph Henry Beale

The Proximate Consequences of an Act

0.79

8

William M. Landes

Causation in Tort Law: An Economic Approach

0.73

9

Guido Calabresi

Concerning Cause and the Law of Torts

0.68

10

Sanford H. Kadish

Complicity, Cause and Blame: A Study in the Interpretation of Doctrine

0.67

A7 Top terms and works in Theory of rights / Contracts

Terms A7 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Theory of rights / Contracts (tf-idf)

Works A7 - Most eigenvector central works in Theory of rights / Contracts (N = 41)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Herbert LA Hart

Are There Any Natural Rights?

1.00

2

Wesley N. Hohfeld

Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning

0.80

3

Leif Wenar

The Nature of Rights

0.69

4

Joel Feinberg

The Nature and Value of Rights

0.62

5

Matthew H. Kramer

Theories of Rights: Is There a Third Way?

0.55

6

Herbert LA Hart

Essays on Bentham: Jurisprudence and Political Philosophy

0.55

7

Gopal Sreenivasan

Duties and Their Direction

0.50

8

Matthew J. Kramer

Refining the Interest Theory of Rights

0.49

9

James Griffin

On Human Rights

0.49

10

Gopal Sreenivasan

A Hybrid Theory of Claim−Rights

0.44

A8 Top terms and works in Justifications and excuses

Terms A8 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Justifications and excuses (tf-idf)

Works A8 - Most eigenvector central works in Justifications and excuses (N = 29)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Kent Greenawalt

The Perplexing Borders of Justification and Excuse

1.00

2

Meir Dan−Cohen

Decision Rules and Conduct Rules: On Acoustic Separation in Criminal Law

0.84

3

Paul H. Robinson

Criminal Law Defenses: A Systematic Analysis

0.70

4

George P. Fletcher

Proportionality and the Psychotic Aggressor: A Vignette in Comparative Criminal Theory

0.55

5

Edward B. Arnolds

The Defense of Necessity in Criminal Law: The Right to Choose the Lesser Evil

0.50

6

Michael Louis Corrado

Notes on the Structure of a Theory of Excuse

0.50

7

JL Austin

I.−A Plea for Excuses: The Presidential Address

0.46

8

John Gardner

The Gist of Excuses

0.41

9

Larry Alexander

Lesser Evils: A Closer Look at the Paradigmatic Justification

0.40

10

Douglas Husak

Justifications and the Criminal Liability of

Accessories

0.34

A9 Top terms and works in Legal reasoning

Terms A9 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Self-defence / War / Killing (tf-idf)

Works A9 - Most eigenvector central works in Self-defence / War / Killing (N = 28)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Jeff McMahan

The Basis of Moral Liability to Defensive Killing

1.00

2

Jeff McMahan

Killing in War

1.00

3

Jonathan Quong

Killing in Self-Defense

0.86

4

Michael Otsuka

Killing the Innocent in Self-Defense

0.86

5

Jeff McMahan

Self-Defense and the Problem of the Innocent Attacker

0.83

6

David Rodin

War and Self−Defense

0.80

7

Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

Justifying Self−Defense

0.79

8

Jeff McMahan

The Ethics of Killing in War

0.68

9

Victor Tadros

The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of

Criminal Law

0.61

10

Suzanne Uniacke

Permissible Killing

0.60

A10 Top terms and works in Legal reasoning

Terms A10 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Legal reasoning (tf-idf)

Works A10 - Most eigenvector central works in Legal reasoning (N = 27)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Grant Lamond

Do Precedents Create Rules?

1.00

2

Trevor Bench−Capon

A model of legal reasoning with cases incorporating theories and values

0.99

3

Scott Brewer

Exemplary Reasoning: Semantics, Pragmatics, and the Rational Force of Legal Argument by Analogy

0.87

4

John F. Horty

Rules and Reasons in The Theory of Precedent

0.82

5

Arthur L. Goodhart

Determining the Ratio Decidendi of a Case

0.79

6

Henry Prakken

A dialectical model of assessing conflicting arguments in legal reasoning

0.71

7

Larry Alexander

Demystifying Legal Reasoning

0.60

8

John F. Horty

The Result Model of Precedent

0.56

9

Adam Rigoni

An improved factor based approach to precedential constraint

0.44

10

Cass R. Sunstein

On Analogical Reasoning

0.38

A11 Top terms and works in Sovereignty / Pluralism

Terms A11 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Sovereignty / Pluralism (tf-idf)

Works A11 - Most eigenvector central works in Sovereignty / Pluralism (N = 22)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Neil Walker

The Idea of Constitutional Pluralism

1.00

2

Nico Krisch

Beyond Constitutionalism

0.84

3

Neil MacCormick

Questioning Sovereignty

0.82

4

Neil MacCormick

Beyond the Sovereign State

0.76

5

Benedict Kingsbury

The Concept of 'Law' in Global Administrative Law

0.71

6

Neil MacCormick

Review article. Risking constitutional collision in Europe?

0.64

7

Jan Klabbers

The Constitutionalization of International

Law

0.59

8

Mattias Kumm

The Jurisprudence of Constitutional Conflict: Constitutional Supremacy in Europe before and after the Constitutional Treaty

0.49

9

Nicholas W. Barber

Legal Pluralism and the European Union

0.37

10

Frank I. Michelman

Law's Republic

0.36

A12 Top terms and works in Evidence and proof

Terms A12 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Evidence and proof (tf-idf)

Works A12 - Most eigenvector central works in Evidence and proof (N = 21)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Laurence H. Tribe

Trial by Mathematics: Precision and Ritual in the Legal Process

1.00

2

David Enoch

Statistical Evidence, Sensitivity, and the Legal Value of Knowledge

0.96

3

Judith Jarvis Thomson

Liability and Individualized Evidence

0.96

4

Mike Redmayne

Exploring the Proof Paradoxes

0.87

5

Alex Stein

Foundations of Evidence Law

0.82

6

Michael S. Pardo

Juridical Proof and the Best Explanation

0.80

7

H. L. Ho

A Philosophy of Evidence Law

0.79

8

Larry Laudan

Truth, Error, and Criminal Law

0.77

9

Ronald J. Allen

Naturalized Epistemology and the Law of Evidence

0.74

10

Michael S. Pardo

Safety vs. Sensitivity: Possible Worlds and the Law Of Evidence

0.57

A13 Top terms and works in Natural law

Terms A13 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Natural law (tf-idf)

Works A13 - Most eigenvector central works in Natural law (N = 14)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

John Finnis

Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and

Ultimate Ends

1.00

2

Germain Grisez

The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa theologiae, 1−2, Question 94, Article 2

0.80

3

Ralph McInerny

The Principles of Natural Law

0.64

4

Robert P. George

In Defense of Natural Law

0.60

5

Paul E. Sigmund

Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory

0.60

6

Ernest L. Fortin

The New Rights Theory and the Natural Law

0.41

7

John Finnis

The Basic Principles of Natural Law: A Reply to Ralph McInerny

0.36

8

John Finnis

The Good of Marriage and the Morality of Sexual Relations

0.33

9

John Finnis

Marriage

0.33

10

Crawford L. Elder

Real Natures and Familiar Objects

0.28

A14 Top terms and works in Non-positivism (Alexy & Radbruch)

Terms A14 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Non-positivism (Alexy & Radbruch) (tf-idf)

Works A14 - Most eigenvector central works in Non-positivism (Alexy & Radbruch) (N = 13)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Robert Alexy

The Dual Nature of Law

1.00

2

Robert Alexy

On the Concept and the Nature of Law

0.97

3

centrality

3 Mark Murphy

Natural Law Jurisprudence

0.72

4

Gustav Radbruch

Statutory Lawlessness and Supra−Statutory Law (1946)

0.71

5

Philip Soper

In Defense of Classical Natural Law in Legal Theory: Why Unjust Law is No Law at All

0.56

6

Robert Alexy

Some Reflections on the Ideal Dimension of Law and on the Legal Philosophy of John Finnis

0.45

7

Robert Alexy

Discourse Theory and Human Rights*

0.45

8

Robert Alexy

Law and Correctness

0.45

9

Robert Alexy

On the Thesis of a Necessary Connection between Law and Morality: Bulygin's Critique

0.39

10

Michael S. Moore

Law and Justice

0.22

A15 Top terms and works in Hate speech

Terms A15 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Hate speech (tf-idf)

Works A15 - Most eigenvector central works in Hate speech (N = 12)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Jeremy Waldron

The Harm in Hate Speech

1.00

2

Alexander Brown

Hate Speech Law

0.90

3

Alexander Brown

What is hate speech? Part 1: The Myth of Hate

0.82

4

Alexander Brown

What is Hate Speech? Part 2: Family

Resemblances

0.56

5

Katharine Gelber

Differentiating Hate Speech: A Systemic Discrimination Approach

0.56

6

Manabu Matsuda

Public Response to Racist Speech:

Considering the Victim's Story

0.56

7

Susan J. Brison

The Autonomy Defense of Free Speech

0.41

8

Robert J. Simpson

Dignity, Harm, and Hate Speech

0.39

9

J. Woodford Howard

Free Speech and Hate Speech

0.38

10

Anna Elisabetta Galeotti

Toleration as Recognition

0.22

A16 Top terms and works in Risk and prevention in criminal law

Terms A16 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Risk and prevention in criminal law (tf-idf)

Works A16 - Most eigenvector central works in Risk and prevention in criminal law (N = 9)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Lucia Zedner

Pre−crime and post−criminology?

1.00

2

Markus D. Dubber

The Police Power

0.78

3

Markus D. Dubber

Policing Possession: The War on Crime and the End of Criminal Law

0.69

4

Andrew Ashworth

Preventive Justice

0.61

5

Claire Oakes Finkelstein

Is Risk a Harm?

0.52

6

Andrew Ashworth

Defending the Criminal Law: Reflections on the Changing Character of Crime, Procedure, and Sanctions

0.34

7

John Oberdiek

Towards a Right Against Risking

0.27

8

John Oberdiek

The Moral Significance of Risking

0.27

9

William J. Stuntz

The Pathological Politics of Criminal Law

0.23

A17 Top terms and works in Consent

Terms A17 - Most characteristic terms from titles and abstracts in Consent (tf-idf)

Works A17 - Most eigenvector central works in Consent (N = 9)


#


First author


Title

Eigenvector centrality

1

Heidi M. Hurd

The Moral Magic of Consent

1.00

2

Alan Wertheimer

Consent to Sexual Relations

0.94

3

Larry Alexander

The Moral Magic of Consent (II)

0.84

4

H. M. Malm

The Ontological Status of Consent and its Implications for the Law on Rape

0.70

5

Larry Alexander

The Ontology of Consent

0.70

6

Victor Tadros

Wrongs and Crimes

0.49

7

Melanie Beres

'Spontaneous' Sexual Consent: An Analysis of Sexual Consent Literature

0.30

8

Lois Pineau

Date rape: A feminist analysis

0.10

9

Donald A. Dripps

Beyond Rape: An Essay on the Difference between the Presence of Force

0.10

Code availability

62The code used in this study is available at https://github.com/​bystry89/​legal_philo

—Acknowledgments. Data collection and analysis was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the H2020 European Research Council research and innovation programme (Grant agreement no. 805498). Manuscript drafting was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (2022/47/B/HS5/03415). Guilherme Almeida, Vilius Dranseika, Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki, Tomasz Żuradzki as well as participants of the Special Workshop on the Fragmentation of Legal Theory as an Epistemic Community at the 2022 IVR World Congress in Bucharest provided invaluable feedback on earlier iteration of this work.

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Notes

1 Compare a well-known passage from Dworkin criticizing legal philosophy envisions by positivists as “a discipline that can be pursued on its own with neither background experience nor training in or even familiarity with any literature or research beyond its own narrow world” (Dworkin 2002: 1679).

2 “Hart and Dworkin may differ with regard to the best account of what’s going on when a judge exercises (some kind of) discretion, but it’s not at all clear that what you should do as a judge in such cases depends on whether Hart of Dworkin are right” (Enoch 2019: 82).

3 Similar definitions proposed in the literature: “‘[G]eneral jurisprudence’ should refer to the subset of meta-legal inquiry that concerns universal legal thought, talk, and reality, that is, the part of legal thought and talk—and what (if anything) they are distinctively about—that is universal across all social/historical contexts where there is such thought and talk” (Plunkett & Shapiro 2017: 45); “Whatever else it does, a general theory of law has at its core an account of the nature of law” (Green 2004: 567).

4 See the Section 7: Limitations below for further discussion.

5 While a citation refers to a relation in which one article cites another, a co-citation is a relation between two articles that have been jointly cited by at least one third article. For one thing, co-citation, unlike citation, is a symmetrical relation.

6 See the Section 7: Limitations below.

7 Here is the list: The American Journal of Jurisprudence; Analisi e Diritto; Archiwum Filozofii Prawa i Filozofii Społecznej; Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie; Archives de philosophie du droit; Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence; Criminal Law & Philosophy; DOXA; Isonomía Revista de teoría y filosofía del derecho; Jurisprudence; Law & Philosophy; Legal Theory; Problema. Anuario de Filosofía y Teoría del Derecho; Ratio Juris; Rechstheorie; Revista Brasileira de Filosofia do Direito; Revus – Journal for Constitutional Theory and Philosophy of Law; Rivista internazionale di filosofia del diritto; Schriften zur Rechtstheorie

8 In biblionetwork, the weight is the number of times the two items are cited together divided by the square root of the product of the total number of citations of each item – a measure similar to the coupling angle value (Sen & Gan 1983).

9 In graph theory, a component is any part of the graph for which any pair of nodes is connected, possibly indirectly, to each other, and which is not a part of a larger component.

10 Both of the small components appeared to represent rather niche discussions in the theory of criminal responsibility.

11 Listed in Online Appendix.

12 In graph analysis, eigenvector centrality measures what intuitively could be interpreted as the prestige of a given node within the network, where prestige of a given node is determined by being directly linked to other nodes that are prestigious themselves. For more detail, see Section 4.1: Centrality below.

13 Throughout the article, I use ‘General jurisprudence’ (in italics) to refer to the specific community (subgraph) detected within the analysed graph and ‘general jurisprudence’ to refer to the actual research area and scholarly community.

14 In the context of Natural law, a striking observation is that, even though the community indeed appears to bring together most natural-law texts present in the graph, some notable texts in the natural law tradition ended up in the General jurisprudence cluster; just think of Finnis’ Natural law and natural rights.

15 It is also worth noting that the two communities with a larger value of this statistic are an order of magnitude smaller than General jurisprudence.

16 The NSF classification is frequently employed in similar studies. One of its advantages over the competitors is its disjointness, that is, assigning each journal to just one category on each of the three nested levels. In the present context, its shortcoming is the fact that its coverage is limited to the Web of Science-indexed journals, which excludes citations from non-indexed journals (which are numerous in law and philosophy) and from books. I used the original classification with 9 journals manually reclassified (all of them were philosophy journals, such as Ethics, Synthese, or Philosophy & Public Affairs, originally classified to other disciplines). To increase legibility, I used just 7 categories from the lowest level (Law, Philosophy, Political Science and Public Administration, Economics, Computers, Management, Criminology), one category from the highest level – Natural Science and Engineering (NSE; without Computers), and all the residual categories from the medium level.

17 I use median rather than means in the present context due to the extreme right-skewedness of the data, typical of citation distributions. Notice that the right-skewedness was not such a big problem for citation counts within the graph, as they have a natural upper bound, which allowed me to employ means there.

18 A potential alternative explanation of this pattern is the large size and resulting heterogeneity of General jurisprudence. Small, specialized communities are likely to be consistently cited by scholars from a specific area outside law and philosophy (see, e.g., Criminology citing Risk and prevention and Psychology or Health citing Consent), which then can be observed on the level of medians. This is less likely to happen with a large, less specialized communities, as General jurisprudence.

19 I do not compare the median values across categories, as, due to a potentially unequal coverage of disciplines by the NSF classification (say, a better coverage of Philosophy than Law), such comparisons might be unreliable. Comparing ratios, however, is meaningful and not affected by this risk.

20 To limit the effect 6of citations of extreme ages (many of which appear a result of database errors), I included citations whose age wa7s between 0 and 100 years.

21 See Section 7: Limitations.

22 Seeing this pattern of results as evidence of fixation with old debates is of course just one possibility. An alternative interpretation would notice that it is possible that there is much cutting-edge research going on in general jurisprudence, it is just overlooked because of citing authors’ ignorance or self-enforcing citation patterns. This is certainly a possible explanation, and the fact that it cannot be conclusively discarded is a limitation of citation analysis as a research tool rather than something specific to this study.

23 Such a pattern can be a result of a relatively smaller completeness of data for non-Anglophone journals, or it can be just a result of non-Anglophone journals being more likely to publish items that do not cite anything.

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References

Electronic reference

Piotr Bystranowski, “Self-absorbed, yet interesting?”Revus [Online], 54 | 2024, Online since 06 March 2025, connection on 16 March 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/revus/10886; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13fhq

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About the author

Piotr Bystranowski

Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics, Jagiellonian University (Poland) & Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (Germany). E-mail: piotr.bystranowski@uj.edu.pl.

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Copyright

CC-BY-SA-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-SA 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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