A Bibliometric Overview of Pynchon Studies: Introducing the Thomas Pynchon Online Bibliography (TPOB)

The Belgian bibliographer and independent scholar Michel Ryckx created and maintained the world’s most extensive bibliography of Thomas Pynchon scholarship on his website Vheissu.net from 2002 through 2022. This article introduces a new resource, the Thomas Pynchon Online Bibliography (TPOB), which transforms Vheissu.net’s extensive Pynchon bibliography into an open bibliography on Zotero, a free, open-source, and widely-used reference management software, with bibliographic metadata for each item, and extensively updated with entries and additional metadata for its 1.0 release. TPOB can assist scholars in locating Pynchon studies on specific topics, by specific authors, in specific languages, etc. The TPOB dataset also supports the investigation of novel insights into Pynchon studies, and may contribute to contemporary bibliometric literary studies more broadly. This paper presents exploratory experiments on the Pynchon studies metadata in TPOB including studies by year and page count, text-to-commentary ratio, formal features of bibliographic titles, intertextual fields, and semantic web.