Most cited authors of books in the humanities, 2007

Field	Citations to books in 2007
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Philosophy, sociology, criticism	2,521
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) Sociology	2,465
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) Philosophy	1,874
Albert Bandura (1925- ) Psychology	1,536
Anthony Giddens (1938- ) Sociology	1,303
Erving Goffman (1922-1982) Sociology	1,066
Jurgen Habermas (1929- ) Philosophy, sociology	1,049
Max Weber (1864-1920) Sociology	971
Judith Butler (1956- ) Philosophy	960
Bruno Latour (1947- ) Sociology, anthropology	944
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Psychoanalysis	903
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) Philosophy	897
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Philosophy	882
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) Philosophy	874
Noam Chomsky (1928- ) Linguistics, philosophy	812
Ulrich Beck (1944- ) Sociology	733
Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Philosophy	725
David Harvey (1935- ) Geography	723
John Rawls (1921-2002) Philosophy	708
Geert Hofstede (1928- ) Cultural studies	700
Edward W. Said (1935-2003) Criticism	694
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) Sociology	662
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) Criticism, philosophy	631
Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) Anthropology	596
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) Political theory	593
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) Criticism, philosophy	583
Henri Tajfel (1919-1982) Social psychology	583
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Philosophy	583
Barney G. Glaser (1930- ) Sociology	577
George Lakoff (1941- ) Linguistics	577
John Dewey (1859-1952) Philosophy, psychology, education	575
Benedict Anderson (1936- ) International studies	573
Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) Philosophy	566
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) Psychoanalysis, philosophy, criticism	526
Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) History and philosophy of science	519
Karl Marx (1818-1883) Political theory, economics, sociology	501
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Philosophy	501

Thomson Reuters recently collected citations from the journal literature it indexed in 2007 to books and their authors. In the sciences, the journal is the main vehicle for scholarly communication, whereas in the social sciences and especially in the arts and humanities, the book holds a more important position in conveying and influencing research. The table above lists those authors whose books, collectively, were cited 500 or more times in 2007. While representing a somewhat rough summary, these results provide some insight into the current trends in research in the social sciences and humanities: the listed authors serve as symbols for their ideas and approaches. What this says of modern scholarship is for the reader to decide – and it is imagined that judgments will vary from admiration to despair, depending on one’s view. Nineteenth- and early 20th-century authors, such as Weber, Freud, Durkheim, Wittgenstein, Dewey, Marx and Nietzsche, will likely elicit little surprise. Kant, too, the only representative of the 18th century, is expected. The youngest author, Judith Butler (born in 1956), specialises in feminist studies, queer theory, postmodernism and post-structuralism. But the most telling indicator of current trends is the high ranking of three French scholars born between the two world wars – Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Their influence has recently been surveyed in François Cusset’s French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, Jeff Fort (translator), University of Minnesota Press, 2008.