Highlighting Key Topics in Sociology: A Glance Through the Prism of Citation Network Analysis

Abstract

The work attempts to highlight the key topics in the sociology of 20^th-early 21^st centuries by analyzing publications which appeared in ten leading general sociology journals in the English language. The study is based on a quantitative paradigm and analyzes bibliographic information on Web of Science publications (more than 23 thousand). The data collected served to build a network of citations between publications. Using the network analysis metrics and key-route main path algorithm the authors identify the publications with the highest number of citations which can be considered as the most significant for the authors of the selected journals. The article also traces the connections between the publications and and highlights the topics relevant and dominant are relevant and dominant in a particular area of sociology in a particular time frame.

Acknowledgements. The study was funded by the Russian Academic Excellence Project '5-100'. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for comments on the previous versions of the article, as well as Stanislav Moiseev (HSE) for the ideas concerning the improvement of the current version.