A bibliometric evaluation of the impact of theories of consciousness in academia and on social media

Abstract

Consciousness science has faced both opportunities and challenges in recent years. Some popular theories of consciousness have been described as unfalsifiable and some as “overpromoted”. To objectively evaluate the state of consciousness science as a field, we analyzed bibliometric data for five major theories of consciousness: Global workspace (GWT), Higher-order (HOT), Integrated information (IIT), Local recurrent (LRT), and Quantum theories (QT). We analyzed academic publications, citations, and Twitter activity for each theory. We found that IIT had the highest growth rates in quantity metrics (e.g. publication and citation counts) but was worse in quality metrics (e.g., per-publication citations, proportion of citations with empirical support/contradiction). On social media, IIT and QT were the most-tweeted theories, but their tweets mostly came from the general public. Our findings suggest that a theory’s fast growth in quantity and lack of quality could be explained by its overpromotion on social media.