Abstract
This paper analyses three centuries of developing German-language philosophy journals, from the first journals published in 1665 to those from the first decade of post-WWII recovery. Relying upon two bibliographies of philosophical journals collected in the 1970s, one by Joachim Kirchner and one by Wolfram Hogrebe, Rudolf Kamp, and Gert König, we attained a dataset of 607 journals.To analyse the population of periodicals, we identified three key components: the longevity of each journal and the growth rate and the continuity of the body of the journal population. The most puzzling finding is that there was a rapid growth in the number of journals at the end of the eighteenth century followed by a long decline in numbers that lasted almost a century. This paper analyses the structure of the boom in philosophical periodicals after 1888, followed by the effects of both World Wars, and identifies the communication crisis that occurred at the height of the Weimar Republic.
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Notes
For example, see: Jamme (1994) on the Yearbook for Scientific Criticism(Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik), (the journal edited by Hegel), and Kramme 1995 and Kramme 1997 on “Logos”, the project started shortly before the First War World to organize journals as international enterprises with many national versions (Germany, Russia and Italy).
As supplementary material, we listed 28 German philosophy journals founded before 1971 and remain publishing in 2020.
For more about German-language journals of theosophy in this period, see Pytlik (2005).
Pietsch (2010) shows the role that anonymous journal articles and reviews played in the initial reception of Kantian ideas in the late eighteenth century.
Despite the fact that Kant did not participate in the editorial board of the magazine, there is testimony that Schiller planned to invite Kant to his journal, The Horae (Die Horen) (Osterkamp 2007, S. 63).
Both of these journals were missing from Kirchner (1969–1977) and Periodica philosophica (1972).
When calculating the longevity of a journal, we subtracted the year of the first issue from the year of the last issue, covering all instances of renaming, splitting and merger (and, in the case of the few journals still in operation, the latter year was set at 2020). Thus, the lifespan of many journals technically became zero (meaning no full years), but such results had no effect on the general comparative conclusions regarding the longevity of the journals. We understand that counting journal lifespans in months or, at least, quarters or halves of a year would be more appropriate. However, given the number of journals under study, we believe that a rather moderate increase in the precision of the longevity estimates would have no major consequences for our overall conclusions and would come at a time cost we could not afford. The comparison procedure worked as follows. First, to eliminate the effects of the degeneration of the data at the dataset margin, we limited the population to journals that were first published in or before 1945 (otherwise the longevity of too many journals still in operation would be underestimated). Then, we ran a looped operation. In each iteration, we split the population into (a) the journals first published in or before a certain year and (b) the journals first published after that year; then, we compared these subpopulations. For example, we compared the journals first published in or before 1850 to those first published in or after 1851. The heavily right-skewed distributions of the longevity suggested that a non-parametric test should be used, but both a parametric Welch’s t-test and a non-parametric Wilcoxon’s rank sum test yielded basically the same result. After excluding marginal cases that resulted in subpopulations of extremely unequal sizes, we arrived at 1859 as the best point at which to split the population, as this led to the lowest p-values for the null hypothesis in both tests.
An index proposed by the Swiss botanist Paul Jaccard to numerically assess the similarity of local floras (lists of plant species for given areas). It is calculated as a ratio of the size of the intersection of the two sets to that of their union. For example, the combined number of journal titles for 1914 and 1919 was 71; there were 47 common titles in these two time slices, so the Jaccard similarity for the two periods was 47/71 ≈ 0.662. For the original formulation, see Jaccard (1912).
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Demin, M., Kouprianov, A. Three centuries of German-language philosophy journals (1765–1953): a bibliometric analysis. Scientometrics 126, 5651–5664 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04009-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04009-7