Kelly Hills has been data-mining – collecting and collating information about the frequency with which certain terms appear in paper titles in three journals: the JME, Bioethics, and the AJoB.

I was going to say that the charts are not much use, but that they are pretty and quite cool; and I was going to add that their lack of utility doesn’t matter at all because prettiness and coolness is sufficient to make them worth looking at.  Not everything worthwhile is worthwhile because it’s useful, after all.  Being a philosopher, I have to believe that.

But then it occurred to me that there probably is some utility to them.  Taken with some care, they help us to see what is held to be important by people publishing work – and, I suppose, they might also help decide which journals are more receptive to certain topics (or, conversely, which journals are saturated with them).

Here’s what the JME‘s chart looks like:

The image isn’t perfect, of course: because size is a mark of brute numbers and the algorithm that generates the image isn’t sensitive to context, “ethics”, and “ethical” get separated, when the reality might not indicate that they merit separate consideration.  “Euthanasia” gets only a small amount of attention – which tells us something about the heat-to-light ratios in debates on the topic.  It also gives some support to John Coggon’s idea that it’s getting hard to find anything new worth saying in that particular field – though I’d’ve thought the same, and more, would apply in respect of consent, and that seems to generate a heck of a lot of attention.