Ray Keene: The plan, from our point of view, is to celebrate the vital achievements of Tony Buzan, who passed away five years ago. A brilliant educationalist, a friend of many of the people here. And I'd now like to invite Barry Buzan, Tony's brother and a noted academic, to say a few words about Tony and his insights into his brother's great achievement. So, Barry...
Barry Buzan: Thank you, Ray, and thank you for hosting all of this. I want to tell you a bit of a story about Tony that I imagine none of you knows, and I'm pretty sure that he didn't know either. It's a story about his impact on the academic world. I'm part of that academic world, so you need to put a discount on everything I say because I carry all of the prejudices and biases of that particular world. But the point I want to make is that Tony did have an impact on this world, and quite a substantial one.
Now, to begin with, I mean, Tony's attitude towards academia was always very mixed. I think that's the kindest way I can put this. When he was studying at university, he never took it very seriously, and he didn't pursue his degree very far. And his general view was that academics were rather stuffy and conservative and somehow stood in the way of what he thought of as creative thinking.
He had little interest in, and almost no sympathy for, the idea that academia was driven by methodological considerations by which you hoped to demonstrate the validity of what you were trying to claim was knowledge. Tony was not interested in that one bit, and that's why he never really kind of engaged with academia because it was too limiting for him, too constrained. So in one way he was a bit contemptuous of academia. But in another way he was quite in love with it. As many of you will know, Tony had a great weakness for titles, and it didn't matter where these titles came from, whether they were aristocratic titles, or professional titles, or whatever. Tony loved titles. And if you look at his work, you will see that he was quite assiduous in citing academic work wherever he could find it that supported his own. And he did so in a quite lavish way. Everybody got their full professorial titles and all of that. He liked that side of things.
And in his later years he began to refer to himself as Professor Tony Buzan, and I and some others kind of disapproved of this – ‘disapproved’ would be perhaps the mildest way I can put it. And, thinking about it, I thought he was putting himself at some risk by doing so because he had not properly earned that title. But it gives you certain insight into his mindset: he wanted that kind of recognition.
Now this prompted me to start thinking about his impact on academia. Because here I have to bore you a little bit with methodology. I use a service called Google Scholar, which a few of you might be familiar with, but most of you, quite rightly, are not. So Google Scholar is basically a citation index. It works with a marvellous set of algorithms that troll through global publications, pick up every citation, and list them. And it lists them in quite a detailed way. So I use it because it enables me to see who's citing my work, who they are, what they are doing with it, and which of my works isn't being cited at all. Just kind of sunk without trace, as a lot of academic work justifiably does.
So I get a list of the latest citations to my work from Google Scholar every day, and over the years it dawned on me that The Mind Map Book kept turning up in this list, and that, in fact, it constituted somewhere between five and eight per cent of the citations listed under me.
So, that's quite a lot in terms of citations, and I was kind of curious to look into this a bit more, so I did. Tony was not listed on Google Scholar, so in order to be listed by name, you need to register with it, and he didn't. But because people cited his work, those citations appear so that you can find him and his work fairly easily on this. Now, so I trawled around in this for a bit. Tony's work has about 7,000 citations. 5,000 of those are for The Mind Map Book, which is the one I registered. Another thousand or so were for Use Your Head, and the rest of his work had altogether about another thousand. So 7,000 is the rough number.
So what does that mean?
If I think about my other books, maybe only two or three of them could beat 5,000 citations, and only one of them beats it by a lot. So that gives you some kind of a metric. But perhaps a better one is that the current Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford has 7,000 citations. So 7,000 citations can get you a good chair at a very good university. In other words. Wow! That was quite impressive. And if you move a bit further and dig a little deeper here, you could see a 7,000 citation ranking, as it were, in my field, that would place you about in the top 200 in the world.
Now in my field, there must be at least 20,000 people worldwide. So being in the top 200 is no small achievement. Top 1%.
If you dig even further, another interesting dimension emerges: although I could outrank Tony on the number of citations, I'm pretty sure all the citations to my work will be in my discipline, right?
So I've got a big pile of citations, but they're very narrowly based in just this one discipline. So I thought I'd try and work out what Tony's profile would look like in that respect. So I looked. I wasn't going to go through the whole 7,000, but I looked at the citations for The Mind Map Book and Use Your Head over the last couple of years, which amounted to roughly 138 citations.
I then took those and divided them into disciplines, roughly according to my own count. And got the amazing result that Tony is cited in 15 different disciplines. Wow! 15! Amazing. So the numbers look roughly like this, as you would expect. The bulk of the citations to his work are in what might broadly be called creativity, learning, writing, and education.
And that accounts for 91 of the 138. Next come information studies, computing science and artificial intelligence. 11. Oh, wow. Psychology 10. Management and business studies 8. Engineering 4. Gender studies 4. And then there's a whole bunch that get one or two.
And these include health science, dentistry, accounting, human resources, theatre studies, social work, climate science, space science, and economics. And just to give you a bit of a flavour of this, let me read out just a small sample of the sorts of publications in which citations to Tony’s work can be found.
Some of these are books, some of them are journals:
Book Learning and Instruction Journal,
Journal of Modern Research in English,
A language book,
Strategies for Responsible Innovation,
Book: Technology,
Pedagogy and Education Journal,
Asian Journal of University Education,
Journal of Computing and Information,
Journal of Homosexuality,
Book: Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis,
A Journal of Innovation Management Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval,
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (book),
Work on the older person (book),
Handbook of Engineering System Design Space Science Reviews,
Encyclopaedia of Computer Graphics and Games.
It's an extraordinary list.
Just the range of it is quite staggering. What Tony succeeded in doing, unintentionally, was to build up a professorial profile of academic citations. As it were, real professors like me design their work to get citations. But Tony was not doing that. He was writing for a public audience. So he wasn't aiming for this, but somehow managed to succeed despite himself.
He created a subject that many academics have felt is worth studying. There's a lot of comparative work on how different kinds of mind mapping and the like work in different contexts. You find phrases such as "educational mapping techniques" or "graphic organisers". So there are these framing ideas that contain whole groups of things that, in a sense, Tony got rolling.
So in this rather strange sense, and despite my earlier disapproval of his having labelled himself Professor Buzan, he did make it into academia by a rather unusual route. And I don't think, as I said before, that he was aware of this. But the number and range of citations tells the story, and citations are the gold standard of academic reputations, right? I mean, say what you will about teaching, admin, and all the other stuff. At the end of the day, your standing is about how many citations you have got to your work. And that's what shapes your career. And Tony had the number of citations and this extraordinary range of citations, and they're still coming.
They still come at a rate of more than a hundred a year. So this work is very much alive. It's not something that's in the past and dead. It is outliving Tony, whose work is rolling on. So, in this sense, he did make it to professorial status, and I think hats off to him. Fantastic.
Ray Keene (and audience): applause.
