In recent decades there has been a trend towards greater use of empirical data, for instance corpus data, within linguistics. I analyse a sample of linguistics articles from the past half-century in order to establish a detailed profile for this trend. Based on consistent criteria for classifying papers as evidence-based, intuition-based, or neutral, the resulting profile shows that the trend (i) is real, but (ii) is strikingly weaker in general linguistics than in the special subfield of computational linguistics, and (iii) appears to have begun to go into reverse.