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

• Autores: Luis Martínez Uribe
• Localización: Empiria: Revista de metodología de ciencias sociales, ISSN 1139-5737, Nº 53, 2022 (Ejemplar dedicado a: El Big data en las ciencias sociales), págs. 53-89
• Idioma: español
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  • español

    La sociología como disciplina ha sido definida de formas diversas que intentan abarcar sus dominios y métodos, aunque también se ha considerado inútil intentar definirla e incluso ha sido acusada de estar fragmentada y falta de uniformidad. Al igual que las demás disciplinas científicas, la sociología se puede observar como un sistema social al estar compuesta de complejas relaciones entre actores que incluyen a investigadores, instituciones, revistas y editoriales. Esas relaciones se forman a través de comunicaciones conceptuales y conforman redes que establecen como se organiza la disciplina. Actualmente, el fenómeno del big data ofrece la posibilidad de usar grandes colecciones de datos que permiten analizar la información de los procesos sociales. En concreto, a través de las grandes fuentes de datos bibliométricas la sociología tiene a su alcance ingentes cantidades de datos para mapear y estudiar la evolución de las disciplinas científicas. En este artículo describimos la sociología de los últimos treinta años a través de las publicaciones en las revistas de impacto. Para hacer esto, se emplean datos de revistas de sociología del Journal Citation Reports ampliados con la información de los artículos del Microsoft Academic Graph. Realizamos un análisis descriptivo de las revistas, sus países de origen, lenguas, editoriales y décadas de aparición e impacto. A continuación, evaluamos la evolución temporal del número de artículos y citas, así como la coautoría y el género de los autores. Tras esto, establecemos cuatro grupos de tipos de revistas y estudiamos sus diferencias en las dimensiones anteriores mediante contrastes de hipótesis. Finalmente, representamos las relaciones entre autores y revistas usando una red de afiliación que nos permite detectar grupos de revistas que forman interesantes comunidades temáticas y geográficas.

    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.

  • English

    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.