The DOI matches its Crossref record; 9 of the 9 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Making things happen: a theory of causal explanation
Abstract
Woodward's long awaited book is an attempt to construct a comprehensive account of causation explanation that applies to a wide variety of causal and explanatory claims in different areas of science and everyday life. The book engages some of the relevant literature from other disciplines, as Woodward weaves together examples, counterexamples, criticisms, defenses, objections, and replies into a convincing defense of the core of his theory, which is that we can analyze causation by appeal to the notion of manipulation.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference
Pearl, J. (2009) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511803161 · Cited by 11,653
CAUSALITY: MODELS, REASONING AND INFERENCE
Hitchcock, C. (2001) · The Philosophical Review · doi:10.1215/00318108-110-4-639 · Cited by 4,741
Causation, Prediction, and Search
Spirtes, P., Glymour, C., & Scheines, R. (1993) · Lecture Notes in Statistics · doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-2748-9 · Cited by 4,617
Robins, J. (1986) · Mathematical Modelling · doi:10.1016/0270-0255(86)90088-6 · Cited by 2,451
Causation as a Secondary Quality
MENZIES, P., & PRICE, H. (1993) · The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science · doi:10.1093/bjps/44.2.187 · Cited by 461
Probability, explanation, and information
Railton, P. (1981) · Synthese · doi:10.1007/bf01063889 · Cited by 356
Comment: Which Ifs Have Causal Answers
Rubin, D. B. (1986) · Journal of the American Statistical Association · doi:10.1080/01621459.1986.10478355 · Cited by 281
In Defense of Explanatory Ecumenism
Jackson, F., & Pettit, P. (1992) · Economics and Philosophy · doi:10.1017/s0266267100000468 · Cited by 209
Structural Analysis of Multivariate Data: A Review
Kiiveri, H., & Speed, T. P. (1982) · Sociological Methodology · doi:10.2307/270722 · Cited by 88
Cited by
Explanation in artificial intelligence: Insights from the social sciences
Miller, T. (2019) · Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1016/j.artint.2018.07.007 · Cited by 5,302
A network theory of mental disorders
Borsboom, D. (2017) · World Psychiatry · doi:10.1002/wps.20375 · Cited by 3,482
How to grow a mind: Statistics, structure, and abstraction
Tenenbaum, J. B., Kemp, C., Griffiths, T. L., & Goodman, N. D. (2011) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1192788 · Cited by 1,815
Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences
Hedström, P., & Ylikoski, P. (2010) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102632 · Cited by 1,630
Scott, A. J., Webb, T. L., Martyn-St James, M., Rowse, G., & Weich, S. (2021) · Sleep Medicine Reviews · doi:10.1016/j.smrv.2021.101556 · Cited by 1,094
Metadata
- Venue
- Choice Reviews Online
- Publisher
- American Library Association
- Published
- 2004-06-01
- Volume
- 41
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 41-5840-41-5840
- ISSN
- 0009-4978 (ISSN-L)
- 1523-8253
- OpenAlex
- W2017470614
- Cited by
- 3,371
- References
- 9
- Type
- book review
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Making things happen: a theory of causal explanation. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.5860/choice.41-5840
- The paper
- Making things happen: a theory of causal explanation. (2004). Choice Reviews Online. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-5840
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.