I know nothing A\about Scopus. Does it survey only Elsevier’s journals or all academic ones?

Actually the data here seems to suggest that Philosophy is doing pretty well compared to other humanities disciplines.

And what’s the diagnosis: that too many mediocre articles are being published in Philosophy journals? or that people are citing a too narrow range of articles?

The fact that my papers don’t contain a section called ‘literature review’ doesn’t mean that I don’t , in fact, review the literature on a topic I’m writing about. It does mean that I don’t feel the need to cite everything I’ve read on a topic every time I write about it.

Also – lead times are pretty long in philosophy (not least because reviewing times are long and rejection rates are high. I’d expect that to make a difference to how long stuff takes to get cited.

Folks might find this interesting: http://www.metrics-toolkit.org/

In the comments above, and in the original THE study, I don’t see a citation to the most recent, most complete study of uncited research in the sciences, which was released by Larivière and Sugimoto at the end of last year. A news article about it is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08404-0
Their finding, like mine, is that the percentage of uncited research has been overstated.
There’s an unquestioned assumption, too, about whether the only way that a paper affects further research is through its citations. Certainly, citations can be an effective dispersal mechanism, but in both the sciences and humanities, research is often published in chunks or stages. For instance, I might work through an idea well enough to get an article published, and through that process realize how to strengthen and extend my argument in a second article. Perhaps the second article comes out at the same time, and people who are aware of my research will cite the more developed one. The first one was not a waste, though. Many similar cases can be constructed.

There is an issue about time-frames that may be relevant here. The nine papers I published in the first 10 years of my career (1985-1995) now have an average citation rate (exclusive of self-citations) that I am pretty happy about. But almost all of them were ‘sleepers’.with hardly any citations to begin with and a lot more later. The *total* number of citations to those nine papers at the end of 1999 was less than the *average* number of citations to those papers as of 2018. They have actually had a tenfold increase in their citations in the last nineteen years, nearly three-quarters of the citations dating from 2006, that is the third decade of my career, eleven years after the last of them was published. I’ve got a reasonably well-cited paper (26 citations) which went totally uncited for 10 years, whilst my least cited paper (just one citation) had to wait for a *quarter of a century* before it finally got a hit (surprisingly in Polish!). I used to get depressed about how unread I seemed to be. I sure am glad that I did not die young as I would have died disappointed.

Now an interesting question for the older participants on this thread is whether not they have similar tales to tell. Am I an outlier? If not, then the statistics are not quite as depressing as they seem since being uncited or undercited in the first five years need not be a passport to intellectual oblivion. If I *am* an outlier, however then this may make things worse, since those who get cited, tend to get cited early; those who don’t get cited early tend not to get cited at all.

However, even if ‘sleeper’ papers are fairly common, I am not sure how much difference it makes to the overall picture. For the problem in philosophy and in many of its subdisciplines is that far too many papers are published annually for any single person to keep up with. (Where the output of papers is more manageable the situation is not so dire which probably explains Evelyn Brister’s relatively rosy results. There are – fortunately or unfortunately? – far fewer philosophers of biology or physics than there are, say, ethicists.) Too much is published to pay attention to everything. What compounds the problem is that many of us have interdisciplinary interests and a yen for the history of the subject. If I am endeavouring to extract philosophical juice from the writings of Frances Hutcheson (1694-1746) then I will have less time to devote to the latest issue of Synthese. If I am reading Daniel Kahneman on *Thinking Fast and Slow* then again I am less likely to be reading the latest article in Phil Studies. And if some lucky old bastard such as myself is finally getting the attention for his early work that he has long thought it deserved, well, the attention that is being paid to my younger self is attention that is NOT being paid to a younger philosopher of today. On the assumption that people are less likely to cite what they have not had the time or the energy to read, we have an obvious explanation of why so many papers go uncited or undercited. And it’s not a problem for which there is an obvious fix. I suppose that institutional changes modifying the professional incentives might mitigate the ‘publish or perish’ syndrome, but I don’t publish (nowadays) because I am afraid of perishing. I publish because I want to help solve philosophical problems and to be recognised for doing so. If I won Lotto tomorrow I would not publish less but more, as I would have more time to devote to research and writing. And the same, I think, goes for most of the profession. But a profession, composed of thousands of people most of whom are eager to say their say and for their say to be read and recognised, is profession in which much of what is said is likely to go unread, under-read and consequently under-cited. Thus many, perhaps most, of us are being swatted by the back of an invisible hand. Each ‘intends only [to solve philosophical problems and to be recognized for doing so, but] he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention [namely that his solutions (if any) and those of many others are likely to remain unread or under-read and therefore unrecognized or under-recognized].