The Australian has published its Research Magazine, which includes a list of the top current researchers in Australia in 250 fields.
Two philosophers are on the list.
The Australian‘s top researcher in the “Philosophy” category is Mark Alfano of Macquarie University.
In the “Epistemology & Scientific History” category, Pierrick Bourrat, also of Macquarie University, is named.
How does The Australian create its list of top researchers? Here’s their methodology:
We give every Australian researcher and every Australian university or research organisation an impact score in each of 250 fields of research. This score is equal to the number of citations for papers published (by the individual or the institution) in the top 20 journals of each particular field in the past five years. The researcher and the institution with the top score is the leader of the field. This approach ensures that only quality work, and recent work, is considered. We use publicly available information on Google Scholar to identify researchers, to obtain data on their citations and to link their work with universities and research institutions.
You can view the full list here.
Sad to see we appear to have lost Ethics to the Social Sciences 🙁
Thanks, Phil, hahahah.
The categories are cribbed directly from the Google Scholar taxonomy, which you can check if you read their methodology. That’s why the odd choice of distinguishing philosophy from epistemology. I assume that this taxonomy was determined through some combination of unsupervised learning and natural language processing. It’s not the same taxonomy you’ll find on philpapers, which is more expert-driven. It’s also not the worst taxonomy one could envisage. There are journals that publish in ethics in the “philosophy” category fwiw. Hope that helps clarify things. 🙂