It is never clear to me which things I’ve written have had the most impact. Two easy answers: First, there is forall x. It exists in myriad versions now, customized and translated by people around the world. But that’s a textbook, so it isn’t readily comparable to all the other things. Second, nothing I have written has had too much impact. Still, one can make distinctions even in the low end.
So here are some metrics.
Here are the top five in terms of downloads from Scholars Archive, Albany’s institutional repository:
- Art concept pluralism (with Christy Mag Uidhir)
- State of the field: Why novel prediction matters (with Heather Douglas)
- Underdetermination and the claims of science (my PhD thesis)
- Reid’s defense of common sense
- Realist ennui and the base rate fallacy (with Craig Callender)
And here’s the top five in terms of downloads from PhilPeople:
- Scientific enquiry and natural kinds: From planets to mallards
- Reality, sex, and cyberspace
- On trusting Wikipedia
- Realist ennui and the base rate fallacy
- What kind of is-ought gap is there and what kind ought there be? (with Jon Mandle)
And the top five in terms of citations, as reported by Google Scholar:
- Realist ennui and the base rate fallacy
- Scientific enquiry and natural kinds: From planets to mallards
- On trusting Wikipedia
- Distributed cognition and the task of science
- Early response to false claims in Wikipedia
The only item on all three lists is a paper about scientific realism, which explains why some people think of me as a guy who writes about realism despite the fact that the point of that paper is that we should stop writing about realism.
I am unsure if there are any other systematic conclusions to be drawn. Partly this is because top five is an arbitrary cutoff.