About Pinakes

Around 245 BCE, the scholar-poet Callimachus undertook what may have been the first serious attempt to make a field of knowledge visible to itself. Working in the Library of Alexandria, he 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.

The Pinakes was not simply a finding aid. It was an argument about the structure of Greek literary and intellectual life, a way of seeing which conversations mattered, who participated in them, and how bodies of work related to one another across time. Callimachus could not have known that his catalog would outlast most of what it indexed; yet the project's underlying question persists wherever a scholarly community grows large enough to lose track of its own conversations.

Rhetoric and composition is, we would argue, in precisely that situation. The field publishes across more than two dozen journals simultaneously, from CCC and College English to Kairos and Enculturation, and no comprehensive, open, discipline-specific index of that journal literature currently exists. Scholars rely on Google Scholar, JSTOR, and informal networks to track what is being published; however, none of these tools are designed for the particular contours of our discipline, and none of them are free, aggregated, and built with our questions in mind.

This project, Pinakes, is an attempt to build the catalog that Callimachus would recognize: a living, searchable index of the field's scholarship, organized not by shelf location but by the patterns of citation, co-authorship, and thematic attention that constitute a discipline's intellectual structure. We named it after the original because the ambition is the same. We want to make the field legible to itself.

Pinakes indexes articles published across the core journals in rhetoric, composition, writing studies, and technical communication. It updates automatically via the CrossRef API and RSS feeds. 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.

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.

Bibliometrics has a fraught history in the humanities. 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; and we share that skepticism. This tool was built with different commitments in mind: exploration over ranking, pattern-finding over prestige measurement.

The citation network surfaces conversations rather than hierarchies. The "Most Cited" list shows what the field has treated as foundational over time; yet foundational is not the same as best, and frequency tells us something about collective attention without telling us everything about worth.

We should also be honest about the journal list. Choosing which journals to include is itself an argument about what counts as "the field," and that argument is not neutral. We have tried to make it thoughtfully, balancing legacy print journals with newer web-based venues, and including both rhetoric-focused and composition-focused publications. We expect the list to evolve as colleagues weigh in on what is missing.

This project owes a significant debt to CompPile, the bibliography of scholarship in composition, rhetoric, and technical communication that Rich Haswell and Glenn Blalock maintained for years as a labor of careful, sustained curation. CompPile was, for a long time, the closest thing the field had to a comprehensive index of its own literature. It was built and maintained largely by hand.

Pinakes picks up that thread in a different era, one where public APIs, open metadata infrastructure, and AI-assisted development make it possible for a single faculty member to build and maintain what previously required a dedicated team. The entire application was built using 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 result is rough in places; but it works, and it will improve over time.

If CompPile was a hand-curated bibliography for a pre-digital field, Pinakes is an attempt at something closer to a living, queryable, self-updating disciplinary observatory. It was built not by a team of developers but by a writing teacher who needed it to exist.

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 Writing and Working for Change series.

My current research focuses on how community college faculty navigate generative AI in the absence of centralized writing program leadership, a phenomenon I have been developing under the concept of "distributed stewardship." Pinakes grew out of that same impulse: the conviction that the field needs shared infrastructure built by the people who actually use it.

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

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

Lewis, Justin A. Pinakes: Rhetoric & Composition Current Scholarship. pinakes.xyz, 2025-present.

I want to be candid about what this project is and is not. 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.

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

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.

I am particularly interested in hearing from graduate students building reading lists or exam bibliographies, from scholars working in disciplinary historiography or bibliometrics, from writing program administrators tracking publication trends across the field, from community college faculty looking for accessible scholarship tools, and from anyone who thinks there is a better way to see the discipline we share.