100 Years of Social Forces as seen through Bibliometric Publication Patterns

Abstract

The 100th anniversary of Social Forces provides a rich opportunity to reflect on the history of the journal and changes to sociology as a whole. Using a series of formal text-analytic methods, we describe the shifting intellectual landscape of Social Forces publications. We uncover a wide diversity of topics that shift over time reflecting the breadth of interests engaging sociologists as Social Forces grew into one of the discipline’s premier journals. In addition to shifts in content, we examine changes in sociological work during this century. We find that articles have generally become more interdisciplinary, while being produced by larger, more gender inclusive and globalized teams. We examine both the most cited papers in Social Forces as well as factors associated with greater recognition. The overall story implied by these explorations suggests a vibrant journal that has shaped the way that sociology has worked over the last 100 years.

Cultural Ties in American Sociology

“…The Word2Vec embedding space is set to a vector size of 100, and we form 10 clusters. From each cluster, we select a word at the semantical central (Moody et al 2022;Li et al 2019), along with 10 adjacent words having the least Euclidean distance in the embedding space 7 , shown in Table 1 (the distribution of the word clusters in the embedding space is shown in Appendix 6). The selected representative words from these clusters reveal that these two communities represent two distinct lines of sociological research that shape the structure of the field, one represents a more explicit focus on social problems, for instance, family, stereotype, and crime, and the other does research beyond them to include more general, theoretical, and 'esoteric' topics (Gondal 2018), for instance, the sociology of culture, economics & market, organizations, and politics.…”

The game of academic publishing: a review of gamified publication practices in the social sciences

“…This may be because their work conforms to the standards and preferences of editors and reviewers. Moody et al (2022) found that most international journals in the field of sociology are located in the U.S. and tend to favor articles submitted by U.S.-American authors. Saunders et al (2016) observed a similar pattern in the field of Higher Education, where, despite an increase in the geographical diversity of authors, the majority of authors are still from a relatively small number of U.S.-American universities.…”

Rising Coauthorship in Sociology, 1895 to 2022

“…These considerations both shape and are shaped by the extent coauthoring is abnormal for a given discipline. The following visualization of nearly 130 years of sociological research in 110 journals demonstrates that coauthorship is not only common but becoming the norm in sociology (see also Leahey 2016:87; Moody 2004; Moody, Edelmann, and Light 2022; Warren 2019).…”