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Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics

Measuring Finleys impact


Version 1.0
April 2013

Walter Scheidel
Stanford University

Abstract: The concluding contribution to a conference devoted to the work of the prominent ancient
historian Moses I. Finley (1912-1986), this paper seeks to measure his scholarly impact by means of a
bibliometric approach.
Walter Scheidel. scheidel@stanford.edu

Measuring impact
What does it take to measure a scholars impact? The phrasing implies both quantification and
comparison. Measuring relies on units of measurement, and any one persons impact cannot be assessed
without considering that which others have had. Much hinges on how we define impact: on peers
thinking and writing, on the academic job market, on the perceptions of the general public? Different
measurements are required to address these questions: of published scholarship, of the success of a
mentors students, of the depth of penetration of the public sphere reach of media appearances, numbers
of books sold, extent of name recognition, and so on. Although many of these features may be measured
in principle, in practice extraordinary effort would often be required to do so in any meaningful way,
especially from a comparative angle. Conventional bibliometrics offers the most practicable approach.
The present survey relies on the citation index currently known as Thomson Reuters Web of
Knowledge, which counts references to individual publications in articles published in a large number of
academic periodicals.1 While use of this index for the purpose of evaluating a scholars performance and
professional standing is standard practice in the Natural Sciences and most Social Sciences fields,
scholars in the Humanities commonly regard this tool with a great deal of reflexive skepticism, a
skepticism that tends to be unencumbered by any actual hands-on experience.
Several concerns that have been raised in critical discussions of the citation index need to be
taken into account in employing it for an evaluation of Finleys impact, but none of them discredits its
use.2 It is certainly problematic that the Arts and Humanities Citation Index covers only references found
in journals published since 1975, a huge deficit compared to coverage in the Natural and Social Sciences
that commenced in 1898/99.3 This truncation of the bibliographical record in effect favors recent
scholarship: publications that appeared before 1975 and were frequently cited soon after publication thus
fail to receive the attention they deserve. However, this bias merely reinforces an even greater bias caused
by the massive increase in overall publications in the decades since 1975.4 While scholars who were
active before 1975 (a period covering all but the last eleven years of Finleys own career) are somewhat
disadvantaged by the indexs belated onset of coverage, they are even more disadvantaged by the relative
scarcity of opportunities to be cited in earlier decades. Citation scores are not directly comparable over
time not so much because of the 1975 index threshold as because of changes in the volume of published
scholarship and hence citations in general, an issue that is by no means limited to the Humanities.
The index only includes citations made in journal articles and omits those in books. In
Humanities disciplines, where books account for a sizeable share of the total page count, this substantially
reduces the number of referenced citations without distorting the distribution of citation scores: there is
This paper was prepared for the publication of the Finley centenary conference held in Cambridge (UK) in May
2012.
1
This survey is based on the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index of
Thomson
Reuter
Web
of
Knowledge:
http://www.webofknowledge.com,
with
http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/web_of_science/.
Unless
otherwise
noted, citation counts reflect conditions in April 2012. Readers should note that this database is continuously being
updated and citation counts are bound to change accordingly.
2
For discussions of some of the problems, see C. Kosmopoulos and D. Pumain, Citation, citation, citation:
bibliometrics, the web and the Social Sciences and Humanities, Cybergeo : European Journal of Geography,
Science et Toile, Article 411, December 17, 2007 (http://cybergeo.revues.org/15463); A. Baneyx, Publish or
Perish as citation metrics used to analyze scientific output in the humanities: international case studies in
economics, geography, social sciences, philosophy, and history, Archivum Immunologiae et Therapiae
Experimentalis 56 (2008), 363-71 (doi: 10.1007/s00005-008-0043-0); P. Jacso, Testing the calculation of a realistic
h-index in Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science, Library Trends 56 (2008), 785-815.
3
To rule out possible misunderstandings, I should stress that for the Humanities it is only citations made prior to
1975 that are missing, not cited publications published before that date.
4
Documented by W. Scheidel, Continuity and change in classical scholarship: a quantitative survey, 1924 to 1992,
Ancient Society 28 (1997), 265-89, esp. 267 fig.1, drawing on a sampling of LAnne Philologique.

no good reason to believe that scholars publishing in journals consistently cite academic works different
from those cited by scholars writing books or chapters for edited volumes. This rules out the possibility of
significant distortion of overall rankings.
The index privileges peer-reviewed journals and more generally those published in Anglophone
countries. In practical terms, this interferes with comparisons between scholars writing in English and
those writing in other languages, who are likely to be underrepresented and consequently excluded from
this survey. This does not affect assessments of Finleys work as such and still allows us to contextualize
his impact within Anglophone scholarship.
Beyond these rather technical points, critics might question the connection between citation and
impact. As observed elsewhere in this volume, frequent references to a particular work do not necessarily
coincide with close engagement with its contents. As a matter of fact, very high citation scores are more
likely to reflect generic acknowledgment of classics than serious debate. Yet it would be perverse to
interpret this phenomenon as a lack of impact: ubiquitous citation is a powerful marker of prestige, which
in an academic context is hard to disentangle from (at the very least past) impact. The three most
frequently cited Humanities scholars Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu are a case
in point: profuse and often merely ritualistic citation of their work cannot be taken to mean that has been
lacking in impact.
In sum, while the citation index is an undeniably flawed measure of scholarly impact, it is
nevertheless a measure, and suitable for assessing the work of an Anglophone scholar most active from
the 1950s to the 1980s.
Finleys work
In a first step, we look at the overall distribution of references to Finleys publications. The
breakdown in Figure 1 shows that almost two-thirds of all citations refer to ten books. If we transfer The
Use and Abuse of History and Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, which consist of previously
published articles, into the right-hand section for papers and minor books, citations are evenly split
between the top eight books and the rest. This shows that although books dominate Finleys scholarly
profile, articles have made a very considerable contribution to his overall impact.

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Fig. 1 Breakdown of citations to Finleys works


A closer look at the ten most cited books reveals a clear lead for The Ancient Economy of 1973,
followed by his initial break-out book The World of Odysseus of 1954. Ancient Slavery and Modern
Ideology of 1980 takes the third place, followed by other books which are only gently differentiated in
terms of rank (Fig. 2).
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Fig. 2 Citation scores for Finleys 10 most-cited books, with years of publication
4

Adjustment for the time that has passed since (first) publication boosts The Ancient Economys
lead over all other volumes (Fig. 3). The drop of The World of Odysseus may in part be due to the 1975
threshold of the citation index, which helps it being overtaken by more recent works published in 1980
and 1983.

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Fig. 3 Annualized citation scores for Finleys ten most-cited books (from first publication date)
Even so, Figure 4 demonstrates that the unique prominence of The Ancient Economy cannot
simply be explained as a function of its publication date very close to the 1975 threshold: it has been more
successful in annualized terms than both older and more recent work. This firmly establishes its status as
the pice de rsistance of Finleys oeuvre.

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Fig. 4 Annualized citation scores for Finleys ten most-cited books relative to time since first publication
Finley and his competitors
Finleys overall impact can only be measured in comparative terms. Analysis of the most
plausible candidates for top rankings, limited to those publishing in English to account for the biases of
the citation index but supplemented by ancient historys doyen Theodor Mommsen, shows that Finley
shares the top spot with his contemporary Arnaldo Momigliano (Table 1).5
Table 1 Citation scores of some leading ancient historians
Arnaldo Momigliano
Moses Finley
Peter Brown
Ronald Syme
Theodor Mommsen
A.H.M. Jones
Michael Rostovtzeff

4,090
4,029
3,898
3,712
3,699
2,611
642

A number of insights can be derived from this tabulation. Not surprisingly, scholarly appeal
beyond a single academic field helps establish extraordinary citation records: this holds true for
Momigliano, with his following among historians of scholarship more generally, for Finley, often the
only ancient historian known to students of later economic history and slavery, and for Brown, whose
work is eminently relevant to the well-staffed field of Religious Studies. At the same time, and perhaps
more unexpectedly, concentration on a single field does not necessarily disqualify contenders from a top
5

For Finley relationship with Momigliano, see Garnseys chapter in this volume.

ranking, as demonstrated by the success of Syme and Jones. Mommsens staying power is particularly
remarkable given that he was active more than a century ago: this suggests that the weight of the citation
indexs bias against older work must not be exaggerated. Rostovzteff has been included here because he
is often invoked as a foil to Finleys approach to the study of the ancient economy: his poor showing
leaves little doubt that Finley has carried the day.6
Adjustment for age is possible only in a purely impressionistic manner. Mommsens record seems
to establish him as the all-time leader of the pack, thanks to a large extent to the continuing relevance of
his technical work on law and epigraphy. Browns books, mostly being more recent than those of the
others in this group, consequently have had a better chance of attracting citations. This means that the gap
between Momigliano and Finley on the one hand and Brown on the other is somewhat larger in real terms
than the raw figures would suggest. At the same time, both Momigliano and Finley relied more on
republication of articles in books than Brown, a practice that tends to offset the other bias.7 For now,
Finley is effectively tied with Momigliano for the position of most cited ancient historian (primarily)
publishing in English and, albeit more problematically given the absence of continental European
scholarship from this survey, probably also for the position of second-most cited ancient historian in
general.
A similar exercise can be performed for individual books on ancient history (Table 2). Here the
top spot is occupied by Edward Gibbons epic History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
which presumably owes much of its prominence to its attraction to historians of scholarship and the
Enlightenment. Among more contemporary works, Joness massive survey of the Later Roman Empire
leads due to its continuing relevance to many studies of an entire sub-field. Browns books are
disproportionately well represented, aided in part by their relatively recent publication dates, an effect
discernible in the inverse correlation of ranking with age. The only book by Finley to break into these top
ranks is The Ancient Economy.
Table 2 Citation scores for some top-ranked ancient history books
Work

Gross score

Gibbon, Decline and Fall (1776-88)


Jones, Later Roman Empire (1964)
Brown, Body and Society (1988)
Brown, Cult of the Saints (1981)
Syme, Roman Revolution (1939)
Finley, Ancient Economy (1973)
Syme, Tacitus (1958)
Brown, Augustine (1967)

1,294
798
716
641
626
589
549
539

Annualized score
16.6
29.8
20.7
8.6
15.1
10.2
12.0

Finleys aggregate citations score is put in perspective by the fact that it far exceeds those of any
living Greco-Roman historians except Peter Brown. In a somewhat older data set for ancient historians in
the United States (compiled in 2008 and therefore reflecting a marginally earlier time horizon), prominent
practitioners such as Ernst Badian (then still alive), Ramsay MacMullen or Glen Bowersock scored only a
little over 1,000 citations each, a threshold that as of 2011 had yet to be cleared by any active-duty

Multiple spellings of his name were used in searching the citation index to make sure to capture all relevant
references.
7
In Finleys case, re-publication of articles in books does not by itself account for his high overall citation score:
The Use and Abuse of History and Economy and Society in Ancient Greece account for only about one-tenth of all
citations.

professional ancient historians in the United States.8 In terms of citation count, Finley belongs in a tiny
and extremely select group that constitutes very much a class of its own.
Much the same picture emerges when Finley is viewed in the specific context of his position as
Professor of Ancient History in the University of Cambridge (Table 3). Only his predecessor Jones has
been able to maintain a somewhat comparable standing. It deserves notice that due to the more recent
expansion of citation opportunities, the gap between Jones and Finley on the one hand and their
successors on the other is even more pronounced than the raw data indicate.
Table 3 Citation scores of Cambridge Ancient History Professors, 1925-present
Frank Adcock (1925-51)
A.H.M. Jones (1951-70)
Moses Finley (1970-9)
John Crook (1979-84)
Keith Hopkins (1985-2000)
Robin Osborne (2000-)

279
2,611
4,029
399
1,341
965

As long as we are aware of their various biases and imperfections, quantitative assessments such
as these serve multiple purposes. One is to lend substance to hazy impressions of academic prominence:
just how different are the most famous scholars in terms of their impact? Another one is to get a better
sense of which of their works have contributed most to their academic profiles. Yet another one is to
provide context, and occasionally perhaps even checks, on qualitative explorations such as those gathered
in this volume.
Finley on Finleys impact
But the final word belongs to the man himself. In his interview with Finley, videotaped by the
Institute of Historical Research of the University of London in 1985, Keith Hopkins asked him what he
thought his impact had been:9
Do you think that you and your followers have in any way managed to
change the normal way in which ancient history is practised? You may
not have been setting out to campaign against, but the impact was one of
a campaign, wasnt it, setting up a new school?
To which Finley replied:
Well, school, alright. The difficulty is that there are too many ancient
historians, any statement saying ancient historians now do this is easily
falsified. But I dont have any doubt that [] there is now an increasing
8

W. Scheidel, Citation scores for ancient historians in the United States, Version 1.0, February 2008,
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics (http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/020801.pdf), esp. 7
tab.3; Updated citation scores for ancient historians in the United States, Version 1.0, September 2011,
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics (http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/091102.pdf), 3
tab.1.
9
Moses Finley interviewed by Keith Hopkins, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, VHS Video
1985 (my transcription).

number of ancient historians who do more of what I call proper historical


writing. Now I am not suggesting that I did it, because of me, but I am
prepared to accept that I have some responsibility for it. Whether they
represent more than a minority in the field I doubt because its a bit the
hard way to do things.
Finleys answer puts the finger on the limits of quantification. If his impact has been on the way
scholarship is being done, how can it be measured? Only careful engagement with the scholarly literature
can hope to shed light on Finleys real impact. Hence this volume.

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