Is Attention to Ignorance Growing? A Data-Driven Look at Developments in Ignorance Studies in the Twenty-First Century

This paper asks whether academic and public attention to ignorance and its associated field of study (agnotology, or ignorance studies) grew during the first quarter of the twenty-first century. We draw on OpenAlex for the academic literature, after correcting for a false-positive rate in phrase matching and for a recent indexing anomaly in that database, and on Google Trends for public attention, using a shared scale for both search terms. The answer is yes. The combined share rose from a mean of 0.35 per million in 2005 to 2009 to 4.57 per million in 2020 to 2024, a statistically significant increase (Mann-Kendall trend test, τ = 0.843, p = 3.0 × 10⁻⁹). An independent Pettitt change-point test locates this structural break between 2011 and 2012 (rate ratio 13.6, 95% CI 7.0 to 26.5), three to four years before the Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies appeared in 2015. A control series (misinformation studies and disinformation studies) shows that the ignorance/agnotology pairing led this wider research family, though this lead is no longer assured: between 2020 and 2025, relative to 2014 to 2019, the ignorance share grew 1.6-fold, while misinformation studies grew 20-fold and disinformation studies 42-fold. The paper concludes that this sustained growth, together with the field's documented interdisciplinary fragmentation, supports the case for greater coordination within the field.