This note belongs to the Social Design Lab (ISVD-LAB-003) foundations series. It performs a quantitative analysis of the citation data embedded across ISVD's published articles and offers a self-description of its intellectual structure.
What Is Happening
As of March 2026, ISVD's website (isvd.or.jp) hosts 235 MDX articles. Of these, 172 — 73% of the total — contain references via the <Citation> component, amounting to 938 citations in all (including 7 from this note itself). These citations reference 512 distinct authors and 387 unique sources (journals, publishers, government agencies, and other institutional outlets).
These 938 citations constitute the material trace of what ISVD reads, references, and treats as its intellectual foundation. A citation is an act by which one text summons another; the aggregate of such acts draws a map of intellectual community — who is in dialogue, and who is ignored. This note extracts citation data directly from the codebase and subjects ISVD's intellectual structure to bibliometric analysis.
It is worth noting that this analysis was generated from grep commands run against ISVD's own repository. The object of analysis is not an academic metadata database but the source code itself. Reading the intellectual map of social design from the material substrate of its practice — the codebase — is nothing less than a self-application of EBPM.
Background and Context
Citation Density by Category — What Counts as "Knowledge-Intensive"
ISVD's content is classified into four categories. Citation distribution is far from uniform.
| Category | Articles | Citations | Citations per Article |
|---|---|---|---|
| columns | 105 | 717 | 6.8 |
| guides | 45 | 147 | 3.2 |
| labs | 40 | 232 | 5.8 |
| news | 9 | 0 | 0.0 |
Columns account for 61% of all citations and record the highest density at 6.8 per article. This serves as quantitative evidence that columns are designed not as opinion pieces but as analysis articles grounded in data and literature. The lower density of guides (3.2) reflects the fact that practitioner-oriented content relies primarily on government documents and help pages rather than academic literature. Labs show a high density of 5.8, though lower than columns — an indication that lab articles prioritize deep reading of primary sources over broad referencing.
Author Distribution — Dispersed Diversity and a Long Tail
Author-level citation frequency shows a power-law tendency, but without extreme concentration in any single author. Even the top-cited entity accounts for less than 5% of all citations.
- Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare: 42 citations (4.5% of total)
- Google LLC: 33 citations (3.5%)
- Proctor, R. N. & Schiebinger, L.: 21 citations (2.3%)
- Cabinet Office: 20 citations (2.1%)
- OECD: 19 citations (2.0%)
- Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology: 17 citations (1.8%)
- Tachibana-ki Toshiaki: 13 citations (1.4%)
- Fricker, M.: 13 citations (1.4%)
- McGoey, L.: 10 citations (1.1%)
The top positions are occupied by Japanese government ministries (Ministry of Health, Cabinet Office, Ministry of Education), international organizations (OECD), and technology companies (Google). Among individual scholars, Robert N. Proctor & Schiebinger lead with 21 citations, reflecting the concentration of agnotology-related literature. Miranda Fricker (13 citations, epistemic injustice) and McGoey (10 citations, strategic ignorance) together form the intellectual foundation of the Agnotology Lab (ISVD-LAB-001).
This distribution follows the shape of what bibliometrics calls Lotka's law. Of 512 authors, only 52 (10%) are cited three or more times, while 410 (80%) appear just once. ISVD's citation network shows a dispersed structure without excessive dependence on any single author.
Source Geography — Which Knowledge Institutions Does ISVD Draw From
Analysis of sources reveals which knowledge institutions ISVD is connected to. Of the 387 unique sources, the principal types are as follows.
Japanese publishers: The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (49 citations) leads all sources. Iwanami Shinsho and Iwanami Shoten together total 34 citations, followed by Keiso Shobo (12), Chuo Koron Shinsha (9), and Toyo Keizai (8). Japanese-language academic and general publishers occupy prominent positions throughout the top rankings, indicating a co-presence structure alongside Anglophone publishers.
Anglophone academic publishers: Stanford University Press (22), Oxford University Press (14), MIT Press (9), and Harvard University Press (5). Stanford's presence reflects agnotology-related works by Proctor & Schiebinger and related literature.
Government and international organizations: Ministry of Education (15), Cabinet Office (12), Ministry of Internal Affairs (10), OECD (10), Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (7), and Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (7). Japanese government statistics and policy documents serve as citation sources across multiple categories.
Technology companies: Google for Nonprofits (16+ citations). The guides-category Ad Grants utilization guides are the primary driver.
Temporal Strata — Which Era of Scholarship Is Referenced
The distribution of citation years reveals which historical periods of scholarship ISVD draws upon.
| Decade | Citations | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 2020s | 517 | 61.4% |
| 2010s | 165 | 19.6% |
| 2000s | 94 | 11.2% |
| 1990s | 23 | 2.7% |
| 1970s | 19 | 2.3% |
| 1980s | 10 | 1.2% |
| 1960s | 7 | 0.8% |
| Pre-1950s | 7 | 0.8% |
61% of citations are concentrated in the 2020s. The most frequently cited years are 2024 (150 citations) and 2025 (136 citations), with 2026 already at 55. ISVD's content is clearly constructed as an intellectual foundation for speaking about the present.
At the same time, the 19 citations from the 1970s (with year= accounting for 9) include classics such as Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures, while the 102 citations from the 2000s include foundational agnotology literature (Proctor, 2008, etc.). ISVD's citations form a two-layered structure of "contemporary data" and "classical theory."
Reading the Structure
What Citation Patterns Reveal About ISVD's Intellectual Identity
From the analysis above, three structural features of ISVD's intellectual architecture can be discerned.
First, ISVD writes in multiple knowledge languages. On one hand, it cites Japanese government statistics and policy documents (Ministry of Health, Cabinet Office, Ministry of Education) alongside Japanese-language publishers (Iwanami Shoten, Keiso Shobo, etc.). On the other, it cites Anglophone critical theory (Fricker, McGoey, Proctor) and Anglophone academic publishers (Stanford, Oxford, MIT Press). The former provides the empirical foundation for "What Is Happening" sections, while the latter supplies the analytical tools for "Reading the Structure" sections. This multilingual sourcing means that ISVD's articles are positioned neither as mere data reporting nor as pure theoretical reflection, but at the intersection of evidence and critique.
Second, the relative evenness of author distribution is itself evidence of intellectual diversity. The dispersed structure — where even the top-cited entity accounts for less than 5% of all citations — indicates that ISVD draws from a broad range of literature without excessive dependence on any single author or school. At the same time, the concentration of agnotology scholars (Proctor, Fricker, McGoey) in the top individual-author positions reflects the theoretical focus of the labs category. As bibliometric research demonstrates, citation diversity is an indicator of the health of an intellectual community.
Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas — Garfield, E.. Science, 122(3159), 108–111
Eugene Garfield's 1955 proposal for citation indexing demonstrated that citations are not mere source attributions but devices that visualize the connective structure of knowledge — the association of ideas. The 938 citations in ISVD's network form a relatively dispersed topology without excessive concentration in specific nodes.
Third, the absence of citations is as significant as their presence. ISVD advocates a six-field integration for social design (social policy, participatory design, agnotology, EBPM, civil society, data visualization), but the citation data clearly reveal an imbalance across these six fields.
- Social policy: Well-represented through government statistics (Ministry of Health 42, Cabinet Office 20, Ministry of Education 17, plus Finance and Internal Affairs ministries)
- Participatory design: Developing, with practical literature as foundation (Yamazaki and others)
- Agnotology: Well-represented through Proctor, Fricker, McGoey (44+ citations)
- EBPM: Moderate representation through OECD-related sources
- Civil society: Primarily practical sources; theoretical literature is thin
- Data visualization: Classics such as Tufte are present, but contemporary data journalism literature is scarce
In particular, the absence of theoretical foundations for civil society studies (Putnam, Skocpol, Salamon, etc.) and data journalism methodology (Cairo, Kirk, Lupi, etc.) is noteworthy. At least two of ISVD's stated six fields exhibit low density in the citation network.
On the Practice of Citation Meta-Analysis
What this note has undertaken is an application of the scientometrics methodology developed by Loet Leydesdorff — not to academic journal databases but to an MDX codebase.
Leydesdorff (2001) proposed a methodology for revealing the self-organization of scientific communications through structural analysis of citation networks. Applying a similar structural analysis to ISVD's 938 citations reveals that the intellectual project of social design — whether consciously or not — is strongly bound to specific intellectual traditions and maintains only tenuous connections to others.
Citation is a selective act. The decision of what to cite is inseparable from the decision of what not to cite. What ISVD's citation data reveals is an image of ISVD as an intersection of two knowledge systems: Anglophone critical theory and Japanese government statistics. Simultaneously, it reveals the structural fact that social theory from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Japanese-language academic publications, and first-person narratives (narrative research) occupy the periphery of the citation network.
Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet — Borgman, C. L.. MIT Press
As Christine Borgman (2007) argued, digital-age scholarly infrastructure transforms the very structure of citation. The <Citation> component embedded in MDX files differs from print-era footnotes in being machine-readable, aggregable, and amenable to self-analysis. What this note has demonstrated is precisely this possibility of self-analysis.
References
Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas — Garfield, E.. Science, 122(3159), 108–111
Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet — Borgman, C. L.. MIT Press
The Frequency Distribution of Scientific Productivity — Lotka, A. J.. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, 16(12), 317–323