Graph of memetics articles on Google Scholar

Richard Dawkins proposed tracking the health of memetics by tracking citations of the idea in learned journals - in the second edition of The Selfish Gene.

I plotted such references in a 2008 article titled: Memetics death report exaggerated.

I revisited Google Scholar and made another plot today. This time I used "memetic OR memetics" as my search term, which seems to be the most reasonable thing to search for to me.

Here are the results:

As before, it is best to ignore the last couple of years: Google hasn't indexed all the papers from those years yet.

This time I also did a "control" plot: I searched for "gold":

Here's my raw data:

Year Memetics 1990 15 1991 14 1992 24 1993 28 1994 40 1995 50 1996 70 1997 93 1998 187 1999 264 2000 303 2001 408 2002 538 2003 648 2004 819 2005 1010 2006 1220 2007 1460 2008 1800 2009 2020 2010 2580 2011 2570 2012 42

Year Gold 1990 102000 1991 113000 1992 123000 1993 133000 1994 147000 1995 172000 1996 188000 1997 211000 1998 242000 1999 277000 2000 304000 2001 304000 2002 349000 2003 374000 2004 418000 2005 428000 2006 373000 2007 372000 2008 300000 2009 257000 2010 164000 2011 110000 2012 7660

Others on the internet seem to be noticing downturns in recent years too. For example, this guy appears to have concluded that we are at "peak haplotype" - on similarly flimsy evidence.