Letter from William M. Reddy, Ph.D., Chair, Deparment of History, Duke University (my brother), on the surprising number of references to the original conduit metaphor article.

June 12, 2007

Dear Michael,

Two years ago, in California, I got to know a linguist named Gregory Ward (Northwestern). He was surprised to learn that I was your brother, and very dismayed to learn that you, the author of the classic article "The Conduit Metaphor," had left academia.

Same thing happened at a conference at UCLA in March: Zoltán Kövecses, a linguist from Budapest, asked me if I was related to you, and expressed dismay that you were not in academia.

The other day I was messing around with Web of Science and checked the number of hits that showed up for "The Conduit Metaphor." A list of 354 articles came up. (Attached.)

This is a very high number of hits for a scientific publication. The average article gets about 1 hit. Articles in the very top journals will average 10 hits. Anything over 50 is fantastic. A total of 354 is truly a classic article. Many people get promoted to full professor with 354 hits for their whole career.

Just thought you would be interested.

Bill

The list of 354 scholarly/scientific references to the 1979 article from the Web of Science, June 2007.  These break down as follows: 

• 137 in linguistics
  
• 45 in information science
  
• 43 in psychology
  
• 38 in education
  
• 17 in sociology
  
• 15 in anthropology
  
• 10 in law
  
• 9 in business/economics
  
• 8 in neurology
  
• 7 in medicine
  
• 5 in political science
  
• 4 each in the arts, biology, environmental science, and mathematics
  
• 1 each in architecture, geography, parapsychology and robotics

 

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