2.70 Medical Ethics and Freud

Category: Ethics/Philosophy of Mind

Keywords: trust, medical, disease, medicine, health, torture, symptoms, ranking, patients, patient, gratitude, drug, interpersonal, cancer, risks

Number of Articles: 186
Percentage of Total: 0.6%
Rank: 80th

Weighted Number of Articles: 151.3
Percentage of Total: 0.5%
Rank: 89th

Mean Publication Year: 1987.6
Weighted Mean Publication Year: 1984.1
Median Publication Year: 1986
Modal Publication Year: 1980

Topic with Most Overlap: Ordinary Language (0.0423)
Topic this Overlaps Most With: Decision Theory (0.0201)
Topic with Least Overlap: Ancient (4e-04)
Topic this Overlaps Least With: Quantum Physics (0.00015)

A scatterplot showing which proportion of articles each year are in the medical ethics and Freudtopic. The x-axis shows the year, the y-axis measures the proportion of articles each year in this topic. There is one dot per year. The highest value is in 1980 when 1.8% of articles were in this topic. The lowest value is in 1903 when 0.0% of articles were in this topic. The full table that provides the data for this graph is available in Table A.70 in Appendix A.

Figure 2.163: Medical ethics and Freud.

A set of twelve scatterplots showing the proportion of articles in each journal in each year that are in the Medical Ethics and Freudtopic. There is one scatterplot for each of the twelve journals that are the focus of this book. In each scatterplot, the x-axis is the year, and the y-axis is the proportion of articles in that year in that journal in this topic. Here are the average values for each of the twelve scatterplots - these tell you on average how much of the journal is dedicated to this topic. Mind - 0.2%. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society - 0.3%. Ethics - 1.3%. Philosophical Review - 0.1%. Analysis - 0.5%. Philosophy and Public Affairs - 2.8%. Journal of Philosophy - 0.3%. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research - 0.3%. Philosophy of Science - 0.5%. Noûs - 0.4%. The Philosophical Quarterly - 0.4%. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science - 0.6%. The topic reaches its zenith in year 1980 when it makes up, on average across the journals, 1.9% of the articles. And it hits a minimum in year 1903 when it makes up, on average across the journals, 0.0% of the articles.

Figure 2.164: Medical ethics and Freud articles in each journal.

Table 2.193: Characteristic articles of the medical ethics and Freud topic.
Table 2.194: Highly cited articles in the medical ethics and Freud topic.

Comments

This is a small, and yet fairly disjunctive, topic. Most of the articles are on medical ethics, broadly construed. But there are two other topics that are lumped in here somewhat randomly.

One is that papers on trust ended up here. It’s a little hard to know precisely what things trust should go with. It has connection to work on cooperation and hence (via Bratman), to work on intention. It has connection to work on emotions.. It has connection to work on special obligations, e.g., to friends and family. What it doesn’t really have is a particularly strong connection to medical ethics. Yet that’s where the model decided to put some trust papers. And while they are a very small part of the topic, they make up a large part of its highly cited articles.

The other is that some of the Freud papers ended up here. The normal thing that happened with Freud papers in different models is that they would be semirandomly attached to some other topic. In this model they got split up, and then semirandomly attached to different topics. The result was that some of them are grouped with articles on intention, and some of them are here.

That’s to say, this topic is a bit of a mess. For a lot of purposes, ninety topics worked reasonably well. Right here the model is saying it could have used a few more. There will always be bumps under the carpet in this kind of exercise.