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

Consciousness science faces both opportunities and challenges as it has been maturing as a discipline of science in recent years. Some popular theories of consciousness have been described as unfalsifiable and some as“overpromoted” in the media. To objectively evaluate the state of consciousness science as a field, we analyzed the bibliometric data for five major theories of consciousness, namely, Global workspace (GWT), Higher-order (HOT), Integrated information (IIT), Local recurrent (LRT), and Quantum theories (QT). We analyzed data for both academic publications and citations (2004-2019) and Twitter activity data (2011-2019). We found that the theories varied in terms of their impact in academia and on social media. Specifically, IIT was found to have the highest and fastest-growing raw counts of publication and citation, but have lower per-publication citation counts and proportion of citations with empirical support/contradiction as evaluated by a machine-learning algorithm. The data on social media revealed that IIT was the “most-tweeted” theory, though, together with QT, Twitter mentions of their core papers mostly came from the general public instead of from professionals. Our findings suggest that a theory’s impact quality could be related to its degree of media promotion.