Presentations of philosophical movements normally have to choose a number of key actors for closer study, while making larger claims about a philosophical environment that consists mostly of forgotten participants. Digital methods can help to take the contributions of these participants into account. But extant bibliometric tools do not generalize well to the history of philosophy in the early 20th Century, as citation standards are much looser than in empirical sciences. This is why a group of historians of philosophy has developed mention-based bibliometry (Petrovich et al., 2024).

Our original application is a study of the reception of logical empiricist philosophers in the United States, based on 22,977 articles in 12 Anglophone philosophy journals published between 1890 and 1980. We can now show how and when Carnap rose to a philosophical dominance that could only compare with Kant’s. We also break down the reception of logical empiricism by institutions, confirming that Columbia University publications remained focused on Dewey while logical empiricist philosophy had become the prime topic in other leading departments. The audience is then referred to the web-application https://edhiphy.org through which our database can be explored further, and from where they can create network graphs and empirical studies for their own domain of expertise.