La sociología a través de sus publicaciones en revistas de impacto mediante el uso de big data

Abstract

Sociology as a discipline has been defined in diverse ways that attempt to cover the breadth of its domains and methods. Nonetheless, others have considered futile trying to define the discipline and many have accused sociology to be fragmented and lacking unity. Like the other scientific disciplines, sociology can be observed as a social system made up of researchers, institutions, journals and publishers. These relationships are established via conceptual communications which form networks that establish the way in which disciplined are organized. At present, the big data phenomena offers the capacity to use large data collections to analyse social processes. Big scholarly data sources offer sociology immense quantities of data useful to map and study the evolution of scientific disciplines. In this article we characterised the last thirty years of sociology through its publications in impact factor journals. To do this, we use data about the sociology journals from Journal Citation reports augmented with article information from Microsoft Academic Graph. The analysis starts by describing the journals, countries of origin, languages, publishers, the decades in which they appeared and their impact factor. After this, we evaluate the evolution of numbers of articles and citations as well as co-authorship and gender proportion. Subsequently, we establish four groups of journal types and study their differences in the previous dimensions using hypothesis tests. Finally, we represent the relationships between authors and journals using an affiliation network that allows us to detect groups of journals that form interesting thematic and geographic communities.