The Place of Agnotology in the Field of Ignorance Studies and Industrial Doubt-Making: A Bibliometric Study

Background. Robert Proctor presented “agnotology” in 2008 to name the active production of ignorance, with the tobacco industry as the main case. Since then the word has spread, and this article asks two questions. What place does the word hold in the literature on ignorance, and has it moved away from Proctor’s problem? And where does research on industrial doubt-making now sit: under this word, or in another tradition? Method. Using OpenAlex data, we compared works that contain the word (398 works, 2008–2026) with works that cite Proctor and Schiebinger’s 2008 volume, works that cite Merchants of Doubt, and works that cite a 2006 article by Michaels. We also followed 50 anchor works chosen by the author, and we examined the ozone case and a published list of 28 doubt-making strategies drawn from five industries. Findings. The word’s share of the “ignorance” literature rose about 2.7 times. None of the three hypotheses about drift received clear support, and the intervals are wide. Works that contain the word make up only 8–10% of the works that cite the 2008 volume and 1–2% of the works that cite Merchants of Doubt. Among the anchor works we examined, research on industrial doubt-making has continued mainly outside the word, in a parallel tradition with its own references, joined to the word by a few bridges. For ozone we found almost no such research. The 28-strategy list rests on sources of different kinds, and part of it rests on planning documents. Conclusion. The word has expanded without a clear sign of drift, but the research on Proctor’s problem does not depend on it. The analysis is exploratory, and its results do not extend to the whole literature. Note: This record includes both the main preprint manuscript and the supplementary datasets/materials used in the analysis.