About Pinakes

Around 245 BCE, working in the Library of Alexandria, the scholar-poet Callimachus compiled the Pinakes: a 120-volume catalog that organized the library's holdings by author, genre, and subject, with biographical notes and lists of works for each entry.

A finding aid first, the Pinakes also made an argument about the structure of Greek literary and intellectual life, since sorting the library's holdings meant deciding which works belonged together and under which heading each author appeared.

Rhetoric and composition, I would argue, has grown too large for any one scholar to follow all of its conversations. The field publishes in more than 50 journals, among them CCC, College English, Kairos, Enculturation, and Technical Communication Quarterly. Scholars follow that work through informal networks and through Google Scholar and JSTOR, general-purpose services that weren't built around the field's journals or the questions its scholars ask.

Named after Callimachus's catalog, Pinakes is a searchable index of the field's scholarship; it also traces the patterns of citation, co-authorship, and thematic attention that give a discipline its intellectual structure.

What this is

Pinakes indexes articles and books published across the core journals and book publishers in rhetoric, composition, writing studies, and technical communication. It updates automatically via the CrossRef API, RSS feeds, and targeted web scraping. The back catalog extends to the earliest records each publisher has deposited with CrossRef, which for some journals reaches back to the 1930s.

The site also includes a set of analytical tools built on the same corpus: publication timelines that track output by journal and year, topic co-occurrence maps that surface the field's recurring preoccupations, a co-authorship network that visualizes collaborative relationships, and a citation network constructed from CrossRef reference data that reveals which articles and journals actually cite one another.

The index also includes about 800 scholarly monographs and edited collections from seven publishers, institutional affiliation data drawn from OpenAlex, and individual author profiles with publication timelines, co-authorship maps, and topic distributions. Each article is automatically classified using a 61-term disciplinary vocabulary organized into 13 subject families, grounded in CompPile's glossary and the Bedford Bibliography taxonomy. Articles can be exported in BibTeX or RIS format.

These tools are meant to answer the questions scholars bring to the literature on a regular basis. Who is publishing on this topic? What gets cited, and by whom? How has the field's attention moved over the last decade, or the last fifty years? Are rhetoric and composition and technical communication one scholarly community, or several that happen to share a professional organization?

The project is free to use, and it is open source.

Values

Bibliometrics has a fraught history in the humanities, where citation counts have been used to rank, to defund, and to discipline. Rhetoric and composition has good reason to be skeptical of quantified measures of scholarly value. I share that skepticism, and I built Pinakes to help scholars explore the field's literature more than to rank it.

The "Most Cited" list shows what the field has treated as foundational over time. A citation count records how much attention a work has drawn; I don't read it as a measure of the work's quality.

Choosing which journals to include is itself an argument about what counts as "the field." In making it, I've tried to balance legacy print journals with newer web-based venues and rhetoric-focused publications with composition-focused ones, and I expect the list to change as colleagues tell me what's missing.

Author privacy

If you are an author and you would rather your name not appear here, you can ask me to take it off. Your scholarship stays in the index and keeps counting in everything the site computes — citation counts, the co-authorship network, the most-cited lists — but your name and the traces tied to it, such as institution and ORCID, are replaced with a neutral tag, "Name Redacted by Author Request."

To ask, email me at jlewis2@olympic.edu with the name as it appears here and any variants it shows up under. Please write from an address I can plausibly connect to you; an institutional address is easiest. I review each request by hand before anything changes. Removal is a courtesy I extend to authors who ask, not a statutory right I'm set up to adjudicate: Pinakes aggregates metadata that is already public, and I'm one person reading the requests.

Removal has two limits. It covers your own bylines and author profile, but it can't reliably reach your name where it appears in the bibliography of someone else's article, because I only partly control those citation records. A removed name also stays in the site's backups. In the live index, every refresh re-applies the removal, so a later data pull won't put the name back.

How Pinakes was built

Pinakes draws on CompPile, the bibliography of scholarship in composition, rhetoric, and technical communication that Rich Haswell and Glenn Blalock built largely by hand. Its glossary is one source for the subject vocabulary Pinakes uses to tag articles, and its records supply the index's JAC back catalog.

Public APIs and open metadata infrastructure make it possible for one person to build and maintain an index like this one. I built the application with Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding tool, in a mode of development sometimes called "vibe coding," where a scholar with domain expertise but limited programming background directs an AI collaborator to construct the technical infrastructure. The code is imperfect.

Where to start

Pinakes is a wide site, and where to begin depends on what you're trying to do. The five entry points below are sequenced so each builds on the previous one; if you're in a hurry, start with the last, Coverage.

1. Browse what's been published. The Publication Timeline on the Explore page shows article output across the field, year by year. It's the gentlest entry into the corpus and gives you a feel for which journals are densely indexed and which are sparse.
2. See what gets cited. Most Cited ranks the articles that other indexed work returns to most often, with views by journal, by topic, and by decade. The methodology block on that page is worth reading first: the rankings count only citations made inside this corpus, and journals that don't deposit reference lists show up there as cited but never as citing.
3. Map the conversations. Community Detection partitions the citation graph into research fronts. Combined with Article Co-Citation and Bibliographic Coupling, it gives you three different angles on which scholarly conversations cluster together.
4. Find what to read next. Reading Path takes a seed article and returns its backward citations, forward citations, co-citation neighbors, and bibliographic-coupling neighbors.
5. Read Coverage before trusting any of it. The Coverage page lays out which journals are fully CrossRef-indexed (with reference lists), which contribute only basic metadata, and what each gap means for the visualizations.

If you'd rather look around without a sequence, the Browse all tools grid groups the tools by the question each one answers.

About the developer

I am Justin Lewis, English faculty at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington, where I teach first-year composition, technical communication, and writing studies courses. I also serve as the English Discipline Coordinator, a role that involves faculty scheduling, adjunct hiring and mentorship, and liaison work across the college's administrative offices.

My research sits at the intersection of rhetorical genre studies, technical communication, and AI in writing pedagogy. I have published in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Enculturation, Popular Communication, and several edited collections, including chapters in volumes from Routledge, Utah State University Press, and the WAC Clearinghouse. I have work forthcoming in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Composition Forum, and Didaktik Deutsch.

I serve as Co-Editor and Layout/Design Editor for Literacy in Composition Studies, and as Associate Editor for Parlor Press's Working and Writing for Change series.

My current research focuses on how community college faculty take up generative AI in the absence of centralized writing program leadership, a phenomenon I have been developing under the concept of "distributed stewardship." Pinakes follows from that work: I think the field's shared infrastructure should be built by the people who use it.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/justin-lewis-qualitative

Using this data

If you use data from this site in published research, I would appreciate an acknowledgment of the source; that includes citation counts, publication trends, network analyses, and any other findings derived from the index. A citation along these lines would be appropriate:

Lewis, Justin A. Pinakes: Rhetoric & Composition Current Scholarship. pinakes.wacclearinghouse.org, 2025–present.

Pinakes is a personal scholarly tool that I have shared publicly. It is not peer-reviewed infrastructure, and the data comes from CrossRef and RSS feeds with all the coverage gaps and limitations that entails. Detailed notes on which journals contribute citation data appear on the Citations and Most Cited pages. A full breakdown of which journals and publishers are fully indexed, partially indexed, or missing entirely (and why) appears on the Index Coverage page.

I would encourage users to approach the data here with the same critical eye they bring to any source.

Feature requests and contact

This is a one-person project; however, I welcome suggestions and collaboration. If there is a journal that should be included, a feature that would be useful for your work, or a bug you have encountered, please email me at justalewis1@gmail.com.