In the April 12, 2018, issue of Art Journal, the editor, Rebecca Brown, introduces a work of art (really, a computer program), called CitationBomb by Zach Kailer, intended to create a kind of “denial of service” attack on Google Scholar: “The more users do this, the more Google Scholar will become overflowed with citations. This will make it difficult for the algorithms to make sense of influence or impact.” The overall point is to “devalue scholarly metrics” as they represent in small the horrors of the neoliberal university. As Brown puts it, “what numerical value applies to achieving the arc of a compelling paragraph? [It makes] manifest the un-usefulness of analytics . . . its profound, destructive force.”
Why are “analytics” so destructive? Kaiser explains that Google Scholar incentives “clickbait scholarship.” Meaning, since Google Scholar puts first the books or articles that get the most citations, this leads to a “winner take all” situation with scholarship. Only the articles that are cited often get cited at all, leaving all the other scholars in the dust.
But the real danger is that this trend supports the neoliberal university. Since money is short (thanks to the defunding of higher education by state legislatures), administrators “are told that they need to be strategic about how they steer their institutions. ‘Strategic,’ here, of course, is code for ‘market-oriented.'” Google Scholar, in sum, crushes individuality by applying the logic of the marketplace to scholarship. A book or an article is valued only by how many citations it gets, and this leads to funding decisions: areas that get a lot of cites get money, those that don’t, don’t. Scholarship becomes a popularity contest, and that misses the fundamental point: “What algorithm measures the importance of the time spent sitting in front of a painting with a colleague, developing ideas and discussing the artist’s engagement with complex visual problems?”
All of this sounds very convincing, especially since most of us would agree that popularity should not be equated with quality. Miles Davis, after all, is better than Taylor Swift; Beethoven is better than Kanye West. But taking this perspective also gives us an excuse to look away from a very real problem confronting literary criticism: nobody reads this stuff anymore.
The point was first driven home to me when I looked at Louis Menand’s introduction to a new edition of Lionel Trilling’s 1950 collection of essays, The Liberal Imagination. This was not a sexy or trendy book, as shown by such titles as “Reality in America,” “The Function of the Little Magazine,” “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” and “Tacitus Now ” (classical history always being a hot topic), alongside close readings of Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Keats.
And yet, as Menand says, Trilling “made literary criticism matter to people who were not literary critics,” and the book sold like hotcakes: seventy thousand copies in hardcover, over one hundred thousand in paperback.”[1] And this was in 1950! Can one possibly imagine a book of critical essays selling an equivalent number today?
True, occasionally a book on Shakespeare or Jane Austen will break through to a non-academic audience. But in that rare instance, literary criticism is usually coupled with biography (e.g., Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World) or history (e.g., James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599). Most books of literary criticism have print runs of a little more than one thousand, sometimes less, and they are sold primarily to libraries, where they sit, largely untouched.
But if it’s an old story that literary critics speak and write only for other literary critics, Google Scholar also shows that we are not even speaking to ourselves anymore. As an experiment, I decided that I would go back to the first 2010 issue of four top-tier literary journals—PMLA, Critical Inquiry, American Literary History, and Shakespeare Quarterly, plus one top-tier history journal, American Historical Review. To get published in any of them, you have to run a terrifying gauntlet of strict peer review, and fewer than 10% make it. So getting into these journals is a major achievement. But once in, how often do the articles get out? How often are they cited? I chose 2010 as I figured that would be long enough for an article to be read, absorbed, and then included in another article. The results are utterly dismal.
Since theory still reigns, let’s take Critical Inquiry (37.1) first. Two articles, D. A. Miller, “Hitchcock’s Hidden Pictures,” and Daniel M. Gross, “Defending the Humanities with Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872),” got the highest number of citations: sixteen. The others got anywhere from three to twelve citations. According to the latest MLA Guide to Periodicals, Critical Inquiry has an acceptance rate of 6.6%. I can’t imagine it was any higher in 2010. Yet, at most, eight years later, only sixteen people thought the articles in this issue worth mentioning.
PMLA (125.1) does not fare any better, even though the journal gets sent to every member of the MLA, which in 2010 stood at 30,449. Despite this vastly higher circulation (today, Critical Inquiry has 2,000 subscribers), the citation numbers are roughly the same. Two articles in this issue get twelve cites each, and the rest range between seven and ten. Nor does winning an award seem to help. The winner of that year’s William Riley Parker Prize for the best essay in PMLA (again, I’m not going to embarrass the author by naming him or her) got the lowest number of citations: seven.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his centrality to the canon and pedagogy, essays in Shakespeare Quarterly did better than most. Two essays on Hamlet in volume 61.1 got thirty cites each. But then things start to go downhill. An essay on New Historicism is cited by only ten people. Despite the interest in global Shakespeare, the essay on a Japanese production of The Tempest interested only two people.
American Literary History (22.1) did only slightly better. One article had a grand total of twenty-two citations. On the other hand, another weighed in at two. Nor are the numbers much different when I turned to American History Review 115.1. The good news (I suppose) is that Harold Marcuse, “Holocaust Memorials: The Emergence of a Genre,” had the most citations of all the articles I checked. The bad news is the number: forty-one.
A few years ago, a distinguished literary historian mordantly observed that he was tired of publishing books and articles with a readership in the low two figures. Evidently, he was not exaggerating.
The numbers, however, change dramatically once we move into the STEM fields and Economics. An article I chose at random, Wing and Sakaguchi, “Regulatory T Cells Exert Checks and Balances on Self Tolerance and Autoimmunity,” published in Nature: Immunology 11.1 (2010), was cited 911 times (it went up as I was writing this article); another (perhaps more specialized), Von Boehmer and Melcher, “Checkpoints in Lymphocyte Development and Autoimmune Disease,” has 280 citations. Shifting to American Economic Review 105.1 (2010), the numbers are not as high as Nature: Immunology, but still much higher than what find for PMLA, etc. An article on hospital mergers netted 170 citations; another on the effect of the tsetse fly on African development has 136 citations.
Looking at these numbers, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the distaste for analytics and Google Scholar in the name of purity is a convenient way of not confronting a very unpleasant truth: very, very few people read what we publish. Occasionally, a book or article will break through (e.g., Stephen Greenblatt’s 1988 book, Shakespearean Negotiations, has as of this writing 2,659 citations). But for the most part, we are talking numbers in the teens, often lower, and occasionally, none at all.
These numbers have tremendous implications for the future of the humanities generally and literary studies in particular. The closing of an academic press, such as the University Press of New England or Duquesne University Press, is usually greeted with howls of how the bean counters don’t understand the cultural importance of what they do. But what they publish hardly makes a dent—Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray’s Voices without Votes: Women and Politics in Antebellum New England (University of New England Press, 2010), for instance, netted a grand total of twenty citations—then just how much of an impact do these books have?
Essentially, we have lost our audience, both inside and outside academia, and blaming neoliberalism is not going to change that fact. Because promotion decisions, especially at the more prestigious universities, are largely based on publication, we have created a system in which professors are driven to publish, but once published, for the most part, the book or article languishes unread in a library or on a server somewhere.
It could be said that scholarship isn’t a popularity contest (that’s what Brown and Kaiser say), and counting up citations doesn’t measure how many people actually read the piece and changed how they thought or taught about a particular subject. Citations also don’t measure how personally enriching scholarship can be. Granted, but the whole point of scholarship is to add to the sum of human knowledge, to change the conversation. If hardly anybody cites the article, then what difference did it make?
It could also be said it has always been thus. Scholarship has never aimed at a mass audience, and one can name any number of books published in earlier eras that had miniscule readerships. Just how many people picked up the Latin commentaries on Aristotle, or the many books and sermons on Biblical exegesis, published during the 1500s and 1600s? Probably not many. But the difference is that early modern writers on abstruse topics had the culture’s support for what they did. Literary critics don’t anymore, which helps explain the plummeting number of students majoring in literature (my department is down 44 percent since 2005), and how people such as Scott Walker can get away with university restructuring plans that eliminate humanities majors.
I don’t have an answer for this problem, but I know that continuing to publish works that next to nobody reads is not going to help. We need to figure out a way of reversing this trend and writing in a way that will make what we do matter to people both inside and outside our charmed circle. Scholarship, even if not especially scholarship on abstruse topics, such as investigating where Alexander Pope “stands on the question of Milton’s pauses” is a noble endeavor, and I truly believe there should be a place for it.[2] But given how few people actually read literary criticism, and how it makes a difference for even fewer, it becomes harder and harder to justify underwriting the publication of books and articles that matter to only a tiny group. If this predicament doesn’t change, we are looking at the eventual extinction of literary studies.
Notes
1. Louis Menand, introduction to Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: NRYB Books, 1978), p. vii.
2. John Leonard, “Milton, the Long Restoration, and Pope’s Iliad,” in Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017), p. 451.
