Footnotes to Plato
It tracks citations to five ancient authors—Homer, Pindar, Plato, Aristotle, and Paul—across a corpus of 48 academic journals, published between 1827 and 2022. Shoutout to the folks at JSTOR who kindly provided the data!
Three visualization tools let you analyze how scholarly attention distributes: • between texts, and text-groups, over time,
• within texts, at passage-level granularity, • and how it differs from journal to journal and discipline to discipline.
You can also create exportable bibliographies of articles citing a specific passage at one click.
For the list of journals covered see here; for the full method see methods, and for the data, the data page. For suggestions, questions, feedback feel free to get in touch here: contact.
The three tools
Plot whole texts, or clusters of them, against each other across two centuries. Set Republic beside Laws, or the Platonic corpus beside the Aristotelian, and watch the shares of attention rise and fall.
Open →Inside a single text: which pages, sections and lines the literature keeps returning to, and which it leaves alone. Drill through any passage to the articles that cite it, and export the list as a bibliography.
Open →Set two groups of journals against each other on a single text — philosophy beside theology, or any journals you pick — and see, passage by passage, which journals/fields emphasize which passages.
Open →Three caveats, before you start
Select journals ≠ the whole field
Journal articles only, although included book reviews give a small window onto monographs. The selection skews Anglophone.
Uneven across two centuries
The early decades are thin. Most citations date to after 1980.
Every count is a floor
Especially relevant for Plato and Aristotle. A reference like 80b fits Meno, Phaedo, Timaeus or Posterior Analytics at once. Where the surrounding text does not settle it, the script does not guess. See the graph below for detectable, but unplaceable citation traffic.
Solid is what we could place with confidence. The fade is traffic we detected but could not attribute — shared among the texts a bare page number could belong to, so it is an upper limit, never a subtotal. A short solid bar with a long fade means "much of its traffic couldn't be placed," not "little studied."
Citing and contributing#
If this contributed to published work, please cite as: Kretz, David, Footnotes to Plato: A Passage-Level Citation Index for Ancient Texts, Version 2.0, date. The derived data is published for download so results can be checked or reused.
Publish or edit a journal you would like to see included? Please write to me! Corrections, methodological objections, and suggestions for additional features are also all very welcome.
Acknowledgements#
Claude Opus 4.8 (by Anthropic) wrote all the code for the website and data-analysis. AI never decided whether something is or is not a citation, or what author to assign it to. It helped me think through questions of design, analysis, and it drafted text for the Methods section. The responsibility for all genuinely philological and methodological decisions remains mine. I would like to thank the team at JSTOR Text Analysis Support for sharing the data that made this possible, and Joshua Mendelsohn for feedback on an earlier version.