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In the spring of '09, I was reading a Brian Leiter blog post about recent trends in Philosophy, and I became irritated at the complete and his total lack of data. Philosophers often behave that the discipline itself is knowable a priori, and can't be (or shouldn't be) studied using empirical methods.

I decided to do something about it. The page liked to below runs a simple word-count script that hauls in the RSS feeds from various Philosophical journals. Each of these contains abstracts from some set of recent papers (usually the past issue or so). The abstracts are broken up, common words ignored, and the results tallied. Click 'Details' to see the specifics of which articles are included, their abstracts and even excerpts of where the words occur in those abstracts. Click 'RSS' to subscribe to the feed (one item, updated nightly) of the top ten words for that journal.

Trends in philosophy by word count

Here's a sample: 

Synthese overall word count:
Details RSS

20 articles tallied.

If you know of any journals with RSS feeds I've missed, email me (pbradley AT mcdaniel DOT edu) and I'll add them to the process