Memetics on Google Scholar

Following up on my last blog post, I checked Google Scholar on "Memetics".

This is an update on my "Memetics death report exaggerated" article - from 2008.

Google Scholar shows the following growth for memetics papers:

Growth in "memetics" papers over time

Compared to "cultural evolution", memetics shows similar growth, but starting later and with significantly less popularity.

Genetics is less popular than evolution too - but by less than 2:1. However memeticsis less popular than cultural evolution by more than 5:1. Even after accounting for the lack of interest in cultural evolution, memetics is an under-studied area.

Here's my graph data:

1985 - 1 1986 - 1 1987 - 3 1988 - 2 1989 - 3

1990 - 6 1991 - 3 1992 - 7 1993 - 3 1994 - 7 1995 - 16 1996 - 32 1997 - 43 1998 - 103 1999 - 126

2000 - 126 2001 - 206 2002 - 234 2003 - 225 2004 - 284 2005 - 313 2006 - 346 2007 - 469 2008 - 484 2009 - 557

2010 - 628 2011 - 731 2012 - 488 2013 - 90

Here's last year's plot.