How influential is Brooks’ Law? A longitudinal citation context analysis of Frederick Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month

Citation context analysis is used to demonstrate the diversity of concept symbols that a book-length publication can represent and the diffusion of influence of these concepts over time and across scholarly disciplines. A content analysis of 574 citation contexts from 497 journal articles citing an edition of Frederick P. Brooks, Jr’s The Mythical Man-Month (MMM) over the period 1975-1999 showed that MMM represents a variety of different concepts and is cited in a wide range of subject areas. Over time, a high level of interest in MMM spread from software engineering and computer science to management and information systems, with different areas showing different patterns of focus on concepts within the work. ‘Brooks’ Law’ (the ‘mythical man-month’ or ‘adding more people to a late project makes it later’), accounted for less than 30% of the classified citation contexts. The findings contribute to our understanding of the diffusion of ideas in scholarly communication, and the diversity that can underlie the creation of a reference in a scholarly publication.