New Concepts, Expanding Audiences

What Highly Cited Texts Tell Us about Scholarly Knowledge in the Social Sciences

Bibliographic Data

ID4894763
AuthorsBrint (0000-0002-3475-6661, corresponding author), Steven Brint
Year2017
Volume84
Issue3
Pages637-668
Publication date2017-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0037-783X • E-ISSN: 1944-768X
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/sor.2017.0040
OpenAlexW2766214539
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited36

New Concepts, Expanding Audiences:What Highly Cited Texts Tell Us about Scholarly Knowledge in the Social Sciences Steven Brint (bio) what does the future hold for scholarly knowledge in the social sciences? Some have argued that the social sciences will be marginalized in a future that focuses much more heavily even than our current era does on knowledge produced by the natural sciences and engineering. Others have argued that the future of the social sciences will lie in interdisciplinary work aimed at solving such problems as poverty and declining information literacy. At a time when universities are becoming more centrally constitutive institutions of the "knowledge society" (see, e.g., Baker 2014), I would like to posit an alternative position, one that focuses on the role of social science in revealing hidden forces in social relations and social organization. Concepts such as "emotional intelligence," "social capital," "stakeholders," and "communities of practice" were, for example, developed by social scientists during the 1980s and 1990s and have entered into public discourse not only as modes of understanding but also as influences on social action and, more rarely, in the development of social structures. New concept development is [End Page 637] not the only contribution of important works in the social sciences—methods development and empirical tests of theory are among the others—but it is perhaps the most important way that social science contributes to public understanding. This new way of thinking about the contributions of social science takes as a basic premise that highly cited work offers a more valuable window onto the contributions of social scientists than a random sample of publications could. By citing these works more often than any others, the social science community registers its understanding of what important work looks like. No previous work has attempted a treatment of the content of highly cited social-science research across a range of disciplines. Instead, previous work has focused on the structural circumstances of individual disciplines (see, e.g., Fourcade, Ollion, and Algan 2014), co-authorship and cocitation patterns among members of a single disciplinary community (see, e.g., Mullins 1973), or patterns of citation of the work of particular social scientists (see, e.g., Abbott 2016; Ollion and Abbott 2016). Some have discerned discursive preferences from studies of interactions on review panels (Lamont 2009) or interdisciplinary study groups (Strober 2010). And of course, secondary studies of the contributions of influential social scientists are too numerous to cite. Each of these approaches has yielded valuable information about the social science disciplines, but in a more limited context of disciplinary (or individual) reference than that surveyed here and without the aid of content analysis to determine the substantive contributions of a large sample of the leading contributors across the social science disciplines. STUDY POPULATION AND SOURCES I conducted content analysis on the top 25 cited articles in five social science disciplines (anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology) and the top 50 cited books in the social sciences, including both basic and applied fields, for a total sample of 175 texts.1 On its face, the choice to code the same number of articles [End Page 638] in each discipline would seem clearly biased against the large disciplines of psychology and economics.2 However, the goal of this study is not proportional representation; instead it is to grasp a sense of what leading scholars in these disciplines were thinking and writing about. The samples of articles and books do provide wide enough apertures through which to gain perspective on the work each of these social science communities has most valued in the recent past.3 Needless to say, however, conclusions from an analysis of 175 texts must be drawn with caution. To chart the impact of scholarly articles and books requires that the works have had time to accumulate citations. Yet too wide a time span tells us little about the trajectory of the disciplines. I therefore concentrate on the most recent generation's work, papers and books published during the period 1980–2015. For analysis of articles I use Web of Science (WoS), the most widely used source for journal publications (see, e.g., Javitz 2006; National Science Board

Action (physics) · Epistemology · Literacy · Political science · Premise · Science education · Social change · Social philosophy · Social relation · Social science · Social science education · Sociology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Social and Cultural Dynamics · Social Capital and Networks

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