Quantitative research has explored the status and function of footnotes. Stevens and Williams (2006) examined the transmission of theory through footnotes in the journal <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">Critical Inquiry from</hi> 1974 to 2004. They found that prominent scholars like Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, and Michel Foucault were consistently cited, potentially forming a canon of expected references. However, they noted that citation frequency alone does not reveal how these works were interpreted or used.