synchronicity

My colleagues in the hard sciences (and perhaps in the social sciences as well?) are usually able to calculate in an extremely empirical fashion their "impact on the field" (as our P&T committees require) because their disciplines publish almost entirely in journal articles, which are fed into the citation indexes (our library subscribes to Web of Science; maybe there's another one too?). So they can track how many times a particular article of theirs has been cited by someone else.

That doesn't really work for those of us in the humanities -- sure, there is a "humanities" section of the Web of Science database, but it's woefully inadequate as a measure of our citation rates, because many humanities fields rely on book publication as the supreme measure of academic and professional success. I don't know of any database that tracks footnotes in books -- it seems an unwieldly and unlikely undertaking.

So there's a certain sense of unreality about my publications -- they're circulating out in the world, at least in theory -- but I'm not kidding myself -- the numbers of people who read the kind of journals I'm published in is fairly small. So whenever I hear from someone that they saw an article of mine, I'm pretty stoked. (They don't even have to have read it -- just seeing it in the table of contents is good enough.)

Obviously, if someone else published an article about something directly related to my area of focus I might see it and therefore know if they cited me. But so far I don't think I've stumbled across any that way. (Again, I'm pretty realistic about my limited "impact" on my limited sub-field.)

But I had a great experience of synchronicity this past weekend. The conference I was presenting at involved scholars from two disciplines. I met Professor D , who is in the Other Field, early on in the weekend (it was a small conference, very good for the chatting and networking). At the closing dinner party, he told me that he'd been in his hotel that afternoon reading a new book in his field by Esteemed Scholar -- and had happened to read a chapter that cites something I published! Had he read that chapter before meeting me, or a few days after the conference, I'd never have known. Especially since this book in Other Field isn't something I'd be likely to pick up or read very carefully if I did.

It just goes to show that you really never know who might see your work...