The Globalization of the Social Sciences? Revisiting Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras (2014)

• In Event: 40826 - Knowledge #2: Scientific and Social Scientific Knowledge

Abstract

In 2014, Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras published a quantitative description of global and transnational relations in the social sciences between 1980 and 2009, as measured by publications, collaborations, and citations. This paper has underpinned our sociological understanding of the geographic inequalities in the social sciences, namely that the U.S. maintains its hegemonic stronghold even as Europe has emerged as a second center. However, since then, bibliometric databases have improved their coverage considerably, and the participation of the Global South in the formal institutions of academic knowledge production have dramatically increased. In this paper, I provide an update to Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras’ article, taking advantage of new databases and examining an additional decade of knowledge-making. I find that, while the U.S. and Europe maintain their centrality, the hegemonic position of the U.S. is increasingly unstable, and prior analyses, including that of Mosbah-Natanson and Gingras, have vastly underestimated the scale of knowledge production in the Global South, especially that of Asia. I discuss implications for future research on global and transnational relations in the social sciences, and the reproduction of power via bibliometric (in)visibilities.

Author

• Vineet Xie-Gupta, Northwestern University