bpsr Brazilian Political Science Review Bras. Political Sci. Rev. 1981-3821 Associação Brasileira de Ciência Política 00202 10.1590/1981-3821202000030005 ARTICLE Political Science in Latin America: A Scientometric Analysis 0000-0002-5015-4273 Codato Adriano 1 0000-0002-3864-7673 Madeira Rafael 2 0000-0001-5591-9143 Bittencourt Maiane 1 Universidade Federal do Paraná Department of Political Science Curitiba PR Brazil Universidade Federal do Paraná , Department of Political Science , Curitiba / PR , Brazil Pontifícia Universidade Católica Escola de Humanidades Porto Alegre RS Brazil Pontifícia Universidade Católica , Escola de Humanidades , Porto Alegre / RS , Brazil Correspondence: Adriano Codato. E-mail: adriano@ufpr.br 30 11 2020 2020 14 3 e0007 21 09 2019 21 07 2020 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Studies of Latin American political science are centered on analyses of national cases and are based on intellectual narratives about the institutional development and teaching of the discipline. In this article we take a different, more comprehensive and comparative approach. We distinguish and contrast two Latin American political sciences: one native to Latin America and published in journals from five countries in the region, and one foreign and published in journals from five countries outside the region. We use three types of bibliometric measures: 01. reciprocal citations in 23 academic journals indexed in the Scopus database; 02. co-occurrence of terms in titles and abstracts of 5,880 research articles published between 2006 and 2018; and 03. co-citations of authors in the bibliographies of said articles. The network of journals forms a well-defined archipelago with three clusters separated by language (English, Spanish and Portuguese). The community is divided along two main axes: political approaches versus sociological approaches. The study also points out that themes, authors, and methodologies are not significantly different between these two political sciences.

 Science mapping bibliometric methods theoretical traditions political science journals Latin American Political Science

The World of Political Science’ was a survey sponsored by ECPR-IPSA in 2019 that compiled the responses of 2,466 political scientists from 102 countries and compared the academic communities from regions of the world (NORRIS, 2020).

The survey showed that the subject specialization and the research methods of this globalized political science (PS) are increasingly similar, with rare differences between North and South, East and West. With the exception of normative political theory, a subject area covered by a mere 2% of political scientists, traditional research areas account for an average of 12% of community interest; values that vary little by location 1 . In methodological terms, the data showed that the most frequent approach is ‘historical and qualitative’ (almost 30% of responses) (see NORRIS, 2020, Tables 06 and 07). However, when breaking up respondents by age, the responses of the younger generation, born from the 1970s onwards, indicated “the increased popularity of the subfields of political behavior and methods, but less focus on public policy. Methods have also changed as well with wider use of the techniques of Econometrics and Big Data, and an erosion in the use of policy analysis techniques” (NORRIS, 2020, p. 16).

Having established this framework, what are the specific characteristics of Latin American political science? By ‘Latin American political science’ we mean: 01. the PS produced and/or published in journals from Latin American countries; and 02. the PS produced and/or published in journals from countries outside Latin America, but which deals with politics in Latin America. For brevity purposes, we will call the PS produced in Latin American countries ‘Political Science ‘from’ Latin America’. We will call the PS produced outside the geographic region ‘Political Science ‘about’ Latin America’ 2 . The analyses were designed to contrast the profiles of these two political sciences and their respective scientific cultures.

In the last decade, Latin America has seen major developments in PS research, both academically (educational institutions, authors, and journals), and scientifically (themes, problems, and methods). The existence of works of this type attests to how the discipline has been adopting an increasingly reflexive attitude (BULCOURF, KRZYWICKA and RAVECCA, 2017). In 2019, Ravecca published ‘The Politics of Political Science: Re-Writing Latin American Experiences’. His multi-method research is a good example of this growing capacity for self-analysis.

However, the academic work amassed thus far relies more on national case studies 3 than comparative analyses. Altman (2005) showed that the comparative dimension in collective works in fact resulted from overlapping PS studies in each individual country. Such is the dominant perspective 4 both in the volume compiled by Freidenberg (2017b) and Casas-Casas and Mendéz (2015).

A second characteristic of the works published on this type of PS is the type of analysis employed. In general, the predominant approaches are descriptive and based either on intellectual narratives, or on an analysis of the institutional construction of Latin American PS research and teaching in specific countries (BARRIENTOS DEL MONTE, 2015; BULCOURF and CARDOZO, 2013; HEISS, 2015; MARENCO, 2015).

This article proposes a different approach to Latin American political science – more comprehensive and comparative – based on scientometrics. In summary, “scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of science as a discipline or economic activity. It is part of the sociology of science” (TAGUE-SUTCLIFFE, 1992, p. 01) 5 .

Our goal is to describe the institutional, conceptual, and intellectual structures of this scientific field. We focus on material published at the beginning of the 21st century. We intend to describe the contemporary situation of PS academic production in/about Latin America. We want to answer three questions: 01. how is this ‘scientific community’ organized (i.e., what are its divisions, connections and hierarchies)?; 02. what is the ‘thematic and methodological structure’ of Latin American political science?; and 03. who are the ‘reference authors’ of the discipline in the region?

We analyzed citation patterns, methodological approaches, research themes, and influential authors in 5,880 articles published between 2006 and 2018 in 23 journals indexed in the Scopus database. We made use of bibliometrics to handle this diversity of journals and the volume of research articles. Bibliometrics, in brief, is the use of quantitative analysis for a given scientific production. Through the analysis of its metadata, we may determine recurring patterns within a knowledge structure.

In addition to ‘citation analysis’, an important parameter for revealing scientific impact and establishing scales of power and prestige in a community, two other types of bibliometric measures are used in this article: ‘co-word analysis’ and ‘co-citation analysis’. These enable us to build bibliometric networks and map the conformation and connectivity of a given research domain. Bibliometrics is therefore a powerful analysis tool for mapping the scientific field (i.e., scientometrics) 6 .

The article is divided into five parts. Section two summarizes the characteristics of Latin American political science revealed by the literature. Section three explains the research design, the inclusion and exclusion criteria for journals and articles, and details the meaning and function of the bibliometric measures. Section four presents five bibliometric networks and, through them, the characteristics of PS scientific production. In the last section, we summarize our findings based on the potential of the scientometric approach to expose and explain the knowledge structure of PS. We emphasize the limitations of the bibliographic coverage of our data source (Scopus), the possible bias resulting from the unit of analysis (research articles) and the problems arising both from the type of research (quantitative) and from how we explored and exposed the data (bibliometric network visualizations). Finally, we address some shortcomings in our study, which suggest further research possibilities.

Bibliographic background

Three major characteristics comprise the academic production of Latin American PS: 01. in terms of research programs its priority objects of study are limited to national cases and are rarely comparative, which makes it ‘parochial’; 02. in terms of intellectual influence, it has a circulation and citation capacity restricted to the countries of the region, making it little internationalized; and 03. in terms of scientific communication, articles published in journals have become less essay-based and more backed by empirical analysis.

In the absence of comparative policy analysis, the delimitation of its research objects is parochial. Chasquetti (2017) found that only 20% of the articles published in six major Spanish-speaking journals were comparative 7 . Basabe-Serrano and Huertas-Hernández (2018) analyzed three times more journals than Chasquetti (2017)8 and concluded that only a third of the 531 articles studied had some comparative dimension.

The same holds true when analyzing research about the region published in journals from central countries – the research rarely includes comparative politics. Pérez-Liñán (2017) demonstrated that of the total papers published in the main North American journals on Latin America between 1995 and 2009 9 , less than a fifth (18.26%) had a regional reach. Eight out of ten articles dealt with subject matter restricted to the borders of a single country. Freidenberg (2017a) found that only 24.3% of the graduate theses on the region defended in Spain between 1978 and 2013, were in the field of comparative politics. Dabène (2017) and Birle (2017) also underline the lack of French and German-language comparative research on Latin America.

A second characteristic is the low international circulation capacity of its study subjects. Basabe-Serrano and Huertas-Hernández (2018) found that most authors who publish in Latin American journals were affiliated with research centers in Latin America. Only 13% had ties to European universities and less than 4% had ties to universities in the United States.

There is little research on Latin American politics produced in other regions and published in Latin American journals. Although we find collaborative networks of researchers between Spain, the United States, Poland, and France (BULCOURF, KRZYWICKA and RAVECCA, 2017), Latin America is given scant attention in PS publications, academic theses, and teaching programs. In regards to the United States, Pérez-Liñán (2017) cites the limited number of articles on Latin America published in the main journals, corroborating Altman’s analysis (2006). Madge (2006) finds that researchers interested in Latin America are numerous but tend to occupy a marginal space. Buquet (2013) goes further and identifies a domestic publishing standard whereby Latin American journals not only exhibit a low presence of authors based in North America, but also a low presence of authors living in other Latin American countries.

The third characteristic of Latin American PS is its power of self-analysis. One example is a study by Salatino (2017), who developed a wide-ranging analysis of 306 journals published in 14 countries in Latin America. As he sought to explore the discipline’s ‘scientific communication structure’, he concluded that most academic journals in the region were under-institutionalized.

Articles in journals are not the only form of scientific communication in the social sciences, but they may serve as an indirect indicator of the state of a discipline. Basabe-Serrano and Huertas-Hernández’s data (2018) showed three crucial aspects of Latin American PS culture: research themes, theoretical bases, and methodological approaches. From a content analysis of the papers published between 2011 and 2016 in 22 journals, they found that: 01. 50% of the papers analyzed the following subjects: political parties, elections, democracy, public policies, political theory, and national legislatures; 02. the most popular theoretical approaches were systemic (with almost 30%) and neo-institutional analysis (28%); and 03. methodologically, 66% of the studies analyzed were case studies, 62% were synchronous analyses, and 60% resorted to qualitative analyses (narratives, analysis of processes or causal connections) (BASABE-SERRANO and HUERTAS-HERNÁNDEZ, 2018, pp. 158; 159; 161).

 Research corpus and bibliometric methods

The aim of this article is to provide an analytical map of the ‘underlying structure’ and the institutional, conceptual, and intellectual ‘interaction dynamics’ of PS in the region.

Our study use ‘research articles’ to analyze Latin American PS standards. Our methodological assumption is that citing and cited articles are in some way related to each other (yet to be determined). In Garfield’s classic article (1955), he suggests that this linkage reveals some kind of ‘association of ideas’ between them. Mingers and Leydesdorff (2015) go a step further and assert that “The act of citing another person’s research provides the necessary linkages between people, ideas, journals and institutions to constitute an empirical field or network that can be analyzed quantitatively” (MINGERS and LEYDESDORFF , 2015, p. 01).

We describe the research design, the characteristics of the data source, the selection criteria for the 23 journals and 5,880 documents analyzed, the bibliometric measures, and the software for viewing the citation patterns. We used a distance-based approach to establish networks of journals, terms, and authors. These networks provide, through two-dimensional maps, a succinct representation of the scientific field.

Research design

Table 01 summarizes the study design, procedures, and types of results. To carry out a comprehensive analysis, we selected academic journals in ‘Social Sciences’ in Scopus. We prioritized academic journals that publish research articles about Latin American politics.

The methodological flow of research with political science journals ‘from’ and ‘about’ Latin America
Data retrieved Data types Data analysis Results

Database: Scopus (Elsevier)

Type: academic journals

Subject area: Social Sciences

Thematic categories: ·

•Political Science and International Relations ·

•Sociology and Political Science ·

•Social Science (miscellaneous)

Region: Latin America

Document search: journals’ ISSN

Year: 2006-2018

Document type: research articles

Search within results: politic*

Citation information:

Author(s),

Document title,

Year, Source title, volume, issue, pages, DOI

Bibliographical information: Affiliations, Serial identifiers (ISSN), Editor(s)

Abstract & keywords: Abstract, Author keywords, Index keywords

Other information: cited references

Excel:

•basic statistics data

VOSviewer: ·

•mapping journals’ co-citation, references co-citation, co-words

Gephi: ·

•network measures: degree; weighted degree; betweenness centrality

Descriptive analysis (citations)

Panorama of scientific structure (network types): ·

•VOSviewer visualization of a journal co-citation network ·

•VOSviewer visualization of a term co-occurrence network ·

•VOSviewer visualization of an author co-citation network
Source: Prepared by the authors.

We used the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) as our search parameter for journals in the database. We collected the metadata on August 25, 2019. Table 01 presents, in the ‘data types’ column, a list of variables for each article in the database. We used three software programs to analyze the documents: Excel, for frequency statistics (such as the number of reciprocal citations between PS journals or occurrence of terms and authors); VOSviewer, for the construction of bibliometric networks; and Gephi, to determine the network measurements. The database for reproducing the tests has been published and is available (BITTENCOURT and CODATO, 2020).

 Database

In the selection of Latin American PS journals, we opted to analyze titles indexed in Scopus. Journals in the Scopus database are the most important in their fields of knowledge and obey precise indexing criteria (such as: peer review, diversity in geographical distribution of editors and authors, academic contribution to the field, citedness of journal articles in Scopus, clarity of abstracts, etc). Although Scopus generally has more limited coverage, the database is far more comprehensive for scientific publications in the region than Web of Science. Nonetheless, there are some important limitations regarding the representativeness of the research universe.

There are more than 25,100 indexed titles (circa 23,500 peer-reviewed journals) in the Scopus database. Regional coverage, however, is concentrated in Western Europe (more than 12,000 titles) and North America (about 6,600 titles). In Latin America, there are only 790 active titles indexed in the database (or 3.2%). Distribution between subject areas is also uneven. While health and life sciences are responsible for 46% of the 25,100 titles and physical sciences account for 28%, the entire area of social sciences and arts and humanities comprises only 26% of the database (Scopus, 2020).

In Latin America in 2018, there were only 16 journals in the subject categories of Political Science and International Relations, 38 in Sociology and Political Science, and 33 in Social Science (miscellaneous). Excluding repetitions (12 journals are indexed in more than one category), there are 75 journals that cover several areas of interest: International Relations, Criminal Policy, History, Constitutional Law, Economics, Anthropology, etc. There are significant omissions, however. Specific political science journals, such as Brazilian Political Science Review (Brazil), Política (Chile), and POSTData (Argentina) were not included in our analysis as they are not indexed in Scopus 10 .

Hence, while using Scopus presents a representativeness problem regarding the PS research universe in/about the region, it may be offset by two other properties of the chosen source: exemplarity and depth of analysis.

We present below our methodology for selecting the 23 journals in this study.

 Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Latin American social and political science journals are not thematically specialized. Most are interdisciplinary and publish papers ranging from social history to economics, or from sociology to public administration.

Table 02 reports the inclusion and exclusion parameters for journals that ‘predominantly’ cover political science. The journals had to meet three cumulative criteria.

Criteria for the inclusion and exclusion of journals analyzed from the Scopus database
Criteria Inclusion Exclusion
Classificatory Indexed in the ‘Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science, and Social Science (miscellaneous)’ subject categories Indexed exclusively in other ‘subject categories’ (e.g., History, Economics, Anthropology, Law, Public Administration, etc)
Thematic Mostly publish research articles on politics, in a broad sense Publish research articles on topics linked exclusively to the traditional objects of study in sociology, economics, anthropology, history, law, etc
Regional Research about politics and focusing on Latin American countries Publish research articles on politics, but without directly addressing Latin American countries
Source: Elaborated by the authors.

Table 03 shows the 23 journals chosen from the 75 available in the three subject categories in Scopus.

Political Science journals (from and about Latin America), number and percentage of documents analyzed containing the expression ‘politic*’
Journal Country No. of politic* articles % of politic* articles
from Latin America
Política y Gobierno Mexico 117 1.99
Opinião Pública Brazil 262 4.46
Revista de Sociologia e Política Brazil 437 7.43
Dados Brazil 345 5.87
Revista de Ciencia Política Chile 397 6.75
Revista de Estudios Sociales Colombia 330 5.61
Analisis Político Colombia 299 5.09
Lua Nova Brazil 324 5.51
Izquierdas Chile 127 2.16
Perfiles Latinoamericanos Mexico 119 2.02
Rev. Mex. de C. Polít. y Sociales Mexico 192 3.27
Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana Venezuela 263 4.47
Colombia Internacional Colombia 133 2.26
Reforma y Democracia Venezuela 167 2.84
Gestión y Política Pública México 180 3.06
sub-total   3,692 62.79
about Latin America
Latin American Politics and Society United States 327 5.56
Journal of Latin American Studies United Kingdom 201 3.42
Latin American Perspectives United States 590 10.03
Latin American Research Review United States 381 6.48
Journal of Politics in Latin America Germany 58 0.99
Bulletin of Latin American Research United Kingdom 325 5.53
Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Canada 161 2.74
America Latina Hoy Spain 145 2.47
sub-total   2,188 37.22
Total   5,880 100.00
Source: Prepared by the authors from the database Bittencourt and Codato, 2020.

After selecting the collection of documents published between 2006 and 2018, we chose only the research articles (i.e., we excluded editorials, book reviews and research notes). In order to avoid overtly varied subjects in the articles, or too far afield from PS, we refined the selection of texts in the ‘Search within Results’ to those that contained the term ‘politic*’ in their abstracts. The asterisk (*) is a Boolean logical operator that allows for the inclusion of similar words such as ‘political’, ‘politicians’, and ‘politics’ in the search results. This procedure ensured the inclusion of articles from Political Sociology to Political Theory. This resulted in 5,880 articles out of a total of 6,438 documents 11 .

For purposes of comparative analysis, we separated the journals into two classes, ‘from’ Latin America and ‘about’ Latin America.

In the first group there are fifteen journals from Latin American countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela) and 3,692 articles. In the second group, there are eight journals published outside Latin America (United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Spain), albeit with the subject matter of Latin American politics (2,188 articles).

 Bibliometric methods

Research articles are the base unit of this study and we observed them from three dimensions: ‘journal unit’, ‘term unit’ (words or noun phrases) and ‘author unit’. We used four bibliometric indicators: ‘citation analysis’, ‘journal co-citation’, ‘word co-occurrence’, and ‘author co-citation’.

Citation analysis is the most common measure in bibliometrics. The unit of information is the number of mentions of an item (TODESCHINI and BACCINI, 2016, p. 49). The relative importance in terms of impact, relevance, influence, and visibility of an author, article, journal, or institution is measured by counting the number of times that one of these items is mentioned in scientific papers. This is a good proxy for the hierarchy of the field of knowledge. Co-word and co-citation are semantic and thematic similarity measures between two documents. They estimate the interdependence between two elements (words, noun phrases, authors, etc). These measures are expressed mathematically through networks of relationships.

We evaluated the reciprocal citations between the 23 journals to discover clusters by thematic, theoretical, linguistic, and geographical affinities and the place (central or peripheral) of the journals in the network. McCain’s study (1991) of journals in Economics observed that “journal co-citation data highlights subject relatedness, research specializations, and important dimensions of scholarship” (McCAIN, 1991, p. 295). To understand the ‘institutional structure’ of the field of Latin American PS, we used the countries of origin and the language of publication of the journals to determine the connections and the formation of communities between them.

We then explored the co-occurrence of words in titles and abstracts in the 5,880 articles analyzed to find the most cited terms, such as the proximity and distance of relationships between them, thus identifying research domains. Co-word analysis is useful for mapping the relationship between concepts, ideas and problems, allowing us to discern, indirectly, the conceptual framework of this PS (DING, CHOWDHURY and FOO, 2001, p. 819). Briefly: “Uncover the conceptual building blocks of a literature” (ZUPIC and ČATER, 2015, p. 439).

Finally, we employed author co-citation analysis (ACA). Through the frequency in which authors are cited together in the references of research articles, and how close they are to each other in a knowledge network, we tried to ascertain the intellectual structure (WHITE and GRIFFITH, 1981) of PS in Latin America. According to McCain’s study (1990) on the macroeconomics literature published between 1972 and 1977, ACA is a technique for determining the presence and the difference between ‘schools of thought’ in a given set of research articles, whether in terms of subject areas or style of work.

Table 04 sets out the criteria for the formation of bibliometric networks, the expected results, and how to interpret them.

Types of bibliometric analyses used in the study of the structure of political science from and about Latin America
Type of Analysis Unit of Analysis Observation Unit Networking Basic Purpose Explanation Expected Result
citation cited journals, terms, and authors journal titles, terms in the articles’ titles and abstracts, authors listed in bibliographies   Observe the frequency of direct citations of an item in the corpus of the study to measure its influence. The number of times an item (journals, terms, authors) is cited is an objective indicator of its relevance or impact in a scientific domain. Facilitates the ranking by order of importance of a bibliographic element, as defined by practitioners of a discipline or scientific field.
journals co-citation cited journals journal titles The relationship between items is determined based on the number of times journals are reciprocally cited (McCAIN, 1991). Identify the formation of informal communities in the studied area. The proximity between journals can reveal the institutional structure underlying a scientific field and, by extension, the recurrent practices of a discipline. Allows the identification of scientific, thematic, theoretical, editorial, geographical, linguistic, etc. affinity clusters.
co-word recurring words words in the articles’ titles and abstracts The relationship between words and their binding strength is determined based on the number of times they occur together in articles (CALLON et al., 1983). Discover the conceptual framework of a scientific area. The intensity of the links between the terms and groups of terms in a network is an indicator of their thematic, theoretical, or methodological affinities. Measures the strength of association between terms and, by extension, between themes, problems, concepts, methods, and research techniques in common as coordinated in a field.
author co-citation cited authors bibliographic references The relationship between the items is determined by the number of times documents/authors are cited together in the reference list of articles in the study corpus (White and Griffith, 1981). Point out the different intellectual traditions that shape the structure of a given study area based on the most relevant authors. The frequency in which two bibliographic references are cited indicates that they belong to the same school of thought. Reveals, through the most co-cited references, the intellectual basis and the reference authors in a given research field.
Source: Elaborated by the authors based on Zupic and Čater, 2015.

Bibliometric software

When working with a large volume of information it is advisable to limit the analysis of a scientific subject area to a single type of academic publication (research articles) and limit the analysis of articles to their metadata. Networks are a didactic way of presenting relations between this information. Bibliometric mapping allows us “to examine how disciplines, fields, specialties, and individual papers are related to one another. It produces a spatial representation of the findings analogous to geographic maps” (ZUPIC and ČATER, 2015, p. 429).

The software used for bibliometric calculations and the presentation of the networks was VOSviewer version 1.6.12. The name of the software comes from ‘visualization of similarity’ (VAN ECK and WALTMAN, 2014). VOSviewer was developed by the Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University to perform the construction, representation, and spatial analysis of scientometric data (VAN ECK and WALTMAN, 2010). The mapping technique employed by the VOSviewer is an alternative to multidimensional scaling (VAN ECK et al., 2010). Items are clustered based on direct citation relations (VAN ECK and WALTMAN, 2017). Connections based on similarity are generated based on the number of times two authors were co-cited or the number of times two words co-occurred in the corpus analysis. The networks are undirected.

 Results and discussion

We present the results of our bibliometric measurements through two types of networks: 01. ‘co-citation networks’ between journals ( Figure 01 ) and among authors cited in the bibliographic references of the articles (Figures 04 and 05); and 02. ‘co-occurrence network’ of terms in titles and abstracts (Figures 02 and 03). The guideline for interpreting these networks is: a node represents an element in the network (in this case, a journal, term or author); nodes are represented by circles; different colors indicate different groups (clusters); circles of the same color are more similar to each other than circles of different colors; elements closer to each other are more similar than distant elements; the greater the weight of an element in the network the larger the label and the circle; stronger relationships between terms are indicated using lines in the visualization; the more lines, the greater the interaction between elements; the thicker the lines, the greater the intensity of the interaction (VAN ECK and WALTMAN, 2017).

Visualization of the network of reciprocal citations between the 23 journals in the corpus of the study forming three clusters. Normalization method: LinLog/modularity; Visualization Weight: Citations. Source: Prepared by the authors based on Bittencourt and Codato, 2020.

Language communities: the map of Latin American Political Science Journals

Academic journals work as markers to delimit the organization and the boundaries of a given intellectual space. Several bibliometric studies have already shown that “journal-to-journal citations can be used as an operational indicator for the disciplinary organization of the sciences” (DING, CHOWDHURY and FOO, 2000, p. 56).

In this regard, both the conformation and the attributes of the network of relationships between journals (e.g., the capacity of intermediation of an actor, relations of proximity and distance between them, centrality of degree in the citation network) are parameters of the institutional structure of this PS. Yan and Ding (2014) argue that “institutional scholarly network analysis provides an opportunity to combine mappings from social, geographical, and cognitive perspectives” (YAN and DING, 2012, p. 1314).

Figure 01 shows the map of the journal co-citation analysis. We measured the intensity and frequency of reciprocal citations between the journals from 2006 to 2018. Our goal is to identify clusters to determine the informal communities within this intellectual space.

Figure 01 presents five characteristics of this network: 01. Latin American PS is not a homogeneous community, but an insular organization (an explanation for this configuration is the weight of language in the formation of clusters. The red cluster groups journals in Spanish, the green cluster groups journals in English, and the blue cluster journals in Portuguese); 02. the three islands are separated by their languages of publication; 03. the groups of journals in English and Portuguese are more connected than the Spanish-language subgroup; 04. the relationship between journals in Portuguese and Spanish is much smaller than the relationship between both journals to English; and 05. journals published in English have greater scientific impact than the others.

The graph reveals the intensity of the links between the items by the density of the connecting lines. The more and the thicker the lines, the greater their connection and the greater their capacity to form communities with more internal than external trade. There are two ‘feudalized’ communities. The volume of reciprocal citations in the blue and green clusters is extremely high, as indicated by the thickness of the lines. The bonds of the red cluster are much less intense with each other. The data shows that the journals of the two clusters from Latin America relate more to English-language journals than to each other. That is, scientific interactions – measured by citations granted/received – are organized more like a vertical ‘north-south’ relationship and less like a horizontal ‘south-south’ relationship. The best representation of this phenomenon is the position on the network and the connection between Revista de Ciencia Política and Latin American Politics and Society. The sociogram does not identify collaborations between political scientists who study the same research object or work according to the same methods. Scientific communities are governed by geography and language and, in that respect, they are quite parochial.

Finally, as the size of items and labels are weighted by the number of citations received, the preponderance of English-language journals becomes evident (green cluster). Latin American Perspectives (4,342 citations ), Latin American Politics and Society (4,073), Latin American Research Review (2,942), Journal of Latin American Studies (2,443), and Bulletin of Latin American Research (1,944) are the five journals with the greatest impact.

The data in Table 05 , calculated in the network analysis software Gephi (version 0.9.2), allow for the interpretation of Figure 01 and the structure of this PS according to a different parameter. It indicates weight attributes rather than impact attributes. A journal can have a low impact, measured by the number of citations, but a great deal of connectivity, measured by the number of connections. These are the ten journals with the highest values according to their degree of connection in the network.

Political Science journals about and from Latin America ordered by their degree of network connectivity, 2006-2018
  Weight Attributes Impact Attributes  
Rank Journals Norm. Degree Centrality Weighted Degree Betweenness Centrality N Citations Impact Rank Cluster Color
1st Revista de Ciencia Política 20 242 0.029 1507 6th red
2nd Latin American politics and society 19 503 0.016 4073 2nd green
3rd Latin American Research Review 19 355 0.022 2942 3rd green
4th Revista de Sociologia e Política 19 240 0.017 826 9th blue
5th Dados 19 226 0.020 1143 7th blue
6th Journal of Latin American Studies 18 234 0.027 2443 4th green
7th Bulletin of Latin American Research 18 196 0.008 1944 5th green
8th Opinião Pública 15 303 0.010 1094 8th blue
9th Latin American Perspectives 15 190 0.007 4342 1st green
10th América Latina Hoy 15 91 0.000 214 15th red
Source: Prepared by the authors from the database (Bittencourt and Codato, 2020).

Normalized degree centrality is the absolute number of links of a journal in the network and indicates how many journals it is linked to (citing or cited). This is a measure of the item’s importance to the network. Despite being only sixth in number of citations (impact rank), Revista de Ciencia Política is the journal with the highest connectivity, with 20 direct connections (or 91% of the network). Latin American Perspectives, which is the first in impact, ranks only 9th in connectivity. In other words, Revista de Ciencia Política may have more influence in the field than Latin American Perspectives.

The second measure is weighted degree, which calculates the cumulative strength of an item’s connections in the network. This value is given by the number of documents in which two journals co-occur in the bibliographic reference list of the articles. This value can be thought of as a measure of intensity. It allows us to evaluate the relative weight of a journal within its community. Looking at the data in Table 05 hierarchized by the weight in the network and the clusters to which a journal belongs, we conclude that each community has a ‘leader’: Latin American Politics and Society in the English-speaking community, Opinião Pública in the Portuguese-speaking community, and Revista de Ciencia Política in the Spanish-speaking community.

Finally, betweenness centrality measures the intermediation capacity of a journal and how much it can function as a bridge or shortest communication path between the other nodes. We may think of this as a measure of strategic position in the network and thus of influence. Revista de Ciencia Política is the major connecting node of the entire graph (0.029) followed by the Journal of Latin American Studies (0.027). In the Brazilian cluster (blue), Dados (0.020) is the connecting node.

 Reciprocal affinities: the conceptual map of Latin American Political Science

Co-words analysis is a type of content analysis that uses the co-occurrence of two terms in a corpus of documents. Three measures are important: 01. the presence/absence of certain words; 02. the frequency that these words appear in this corpus; and 03. the proximity between them. There are three assumptions in this type of analysis: 01. that the words in titles and abstracts aptly describe the content of the articles; 02. that a word that occurs simultaneously in two (or more) scientific papers is a valid link between them; and 03. that the occurrence of the same words or the same word pair is very often an indicator of the presence of a research topic, topic of interest, or a form of methodological approach shared by the scientific community.

From this point forward, we present the networks separated by groups of journals from Latin America and about Latin America. Figure 02 and Figure 03 show the strength of association between the most frequent terms in the two political sciences and allow us to recognize concepts or ideas that theoretically and methodologically structure the literature.

Visualization of the network of co-occurrences of the most frequent terms (minimum 10 times) and their reciprocal relationships in titles and abstracts of 2,188 articles from selected journals ‘ABOUT Latin America’ forming 9 clusters. Source: Prepared by the authors based on database Bittencourt and Cobato, 2020. Note: Counting method: Binary counting; Terms found: 645 of 34,269. 387 terms are represented in the figure. A ‘relevance score’ was calculated for each word and based on these scores. 60% of the most relevant terms were inserted in the network. Normalization method: LinLog/modularity; Network Visualization Weights: Occurrences.

Visualization of the co-occurrence network of the most frequent terms (minimum 20 times) and their reciprocal relationships in titles and abstracts of 3,692 articles from selected journals ‘FROM Latin America’ forming 8 clusters. Source: Prepared by the authors based on database Bittencourt and Codato, 2020. Note: Counting method: Binary counting; Terms found: 540 of 53,661. 324 terms are represented in the figure (the 60% most relevant were selected). Normalization method: LinLog/modularity; Network Visualization Weights: Occurrences.

Figure 02 presents information on the main terms of the eight journals ‘about’ Latin America.

We can conclude that the large area in the center and towards the left of Figure 02 can be broadly referred to as ‘political sociology’ and the area on the right as ‘mainstream political science’ 12 . The conclusion is dependent on the perspective of the articles we selected and filtering for ‘politics’.

We may dray five conclusions from this bibliometric map: 01. there is a clearly-identifiable research agenda that deals with more traditional problems and ideas of PS (green cluster, to the right of the map), such as the Judiciary (the Courts), the Executive (the Presidency), and the Legislature (Congress) or voting, parties, and elections; 02. methodologically, mainstream political science deals with data, evidence, hypotheses and variables; 03. this research community is more insular as revealed by the proximity between its terms/themes and more distant from the other items in the network; 04. on the other hand, the themes, problems and concepts of the other seven clusters, in the center and on the left in Figure 02 , are more varied and much more ‘sociological’. There are a few special sociologies: economic sociology (yellow cluster), sociology of violence (blue), sociology of inequality (lilac cluster), sociology of gender (brown), and so on. In a more peripheral position on the network is the orange cluster, which contains topics associated with ‘21st century socialism’ (Bolivia, Venezuela, left, socialism, etc); and 05. the red cluster lists the preferred methods of these sociologies: discourse, paradigm, narrative, and image.

Figure 03 is the visual representation of the network of occurrences of terms in 3,692 articles from journals ‘from’ Latin America. The overlapping of the two figures shows that in both types of journals, intellectual production is structured around the divorce between a mainstream PS (green cluster, right) and political sociology with its typical objects of study (woman, violence, social movements). Furthermore, the divide of methodological approaches is the same as in Figure 02 . The light blue cluster, on the right and closest to the green cluster of ‘pure’ PS, comprises terms such as ‘data’, ‘evidence’, ‘indicator’, and ‘survey’. On the other hand, the red cluster on the left encompasses terms such as ‘theory’, ‘concept’, ‘discourse’, ‘narrative’, and ‘history’, suggesting that there is a ‘qualitative’ focus along this axis.

But what does the data tell us about the differences between these two groups? Table 06 lists the most frequently occurring terms in the two networks, which allow us to highlight the diverging research agendas between the two Latin American ‘politologies’.

Frequency and link strength measures in the network of the most discussed topics in the two groups of journals, about and from Latin America, 2006-2018
Journals ABOUT Latin America Journals FROM Latin America
Rank Term Occurrences Links Cluster Color Rank Term Occurrences Links Cluster Color
1st party* 212 286 green 1st data* 482 308 light blue
2nd data* 197 305 green 2nd concept 454 310 red
3rd discourse 173 304 red 3rd theory 442 308 red
4th woman 166 293 brown 4th party* 430 300 green
5th violence 156 275 blue 5th society 414 308 red
6th evidence 146 276 green 6th election* 323 282 green
7th united states 138 267 purple 7th history 225 281 red
8th identity 136 271 red 8th public policy 215 275 blue
9th culture 132 275 red 9th right 206 293 yellow
10th election* 121 216 green 10th variable 190 263 green
Source: Elaborated by the authors based on the database Bittencourt and Codato, 2020. Notes: * Repeating terms in both groups.

Journals published outside Latin America include issues from under-represented groups (‘woman’, ‘identity’) into the research agenda as well as emerging social problems such as ‘violence’, ‘migration’, ‘immigration’, and ‘human rights’ (terms of the dark blue and purple clusters in Figure 02 ). The term ‘woman’ is the fourth most cited term with more occurrences than ‘violence’, which is the fifth most cited; both are well ahead of ‘election’ (10th). The terms in the green cluster (‘mainstream’) are more frequent among the most important terms in PS articles about Latin America.

Political Science produced and published in Latin America presents a new and different theme in relation to the other PS, which does not appear in Figure 02: the study of public policy and government administration. ‘Public service’ and ‘local government’ appear in the dark blue cluster. This agenda comprises typical problems in the area, such as ‘health’, ‘equity’, ‘good’, etc. Red cluster terms are frequently among the most important in PS from Latin America.

 Divergent disciplines: the intellectual map of Latin American Political Science

Maps based on author co-citation analysis (Figures 04 and 05) express the number of times that two authors are cited together in the bibliographic references of the citing articles (WHITE, 1981). In Small’s classic definition, “co-citation is the frequency with which two items of earlier literature are cited together by the later literature” (SMALL, 1973, p. 265). Therefore, this bibliometric measure looks at the discipline’s past or its base literature. This allows access to schools of thought or intellectual traditions that configure this scientific field (WHITE and GRIFFITH, 1981).

Figure 04 represents the co-citation network of authors mentioned at least 35 times in the references of 2,188 journal documents about Latin America. Figure 05 maps the authors referred together at least 35 times in the 3,692 journals from Latin America. Table 07 summarizes this data by ordering the top five authors in each cluster and allows for a more detailed comparative view.

Visualization of the co-citations network between authors cited at least 35 times in the references of 2,188 journal documents ‘ABOUT Latin America’. Source: Prepared by the authors based on database Bittencourt and Codato, 2020. Note: Counting method: Full counting; Authors found: 53,246. The figure represents 223 authors divided into 4 clusters. Normalization method: LinLog/modularity; Network Visualization Weights: Citations.

Visualization of the co-citations network between authors cited at least 35 times in the references of 3,692 journal documents ‘FROM Latin America’. Source: Prepared by the authors based on database Bittencourt and Codato, 2020. Note: Counting method: Full counting; Authors found: 67,386. The figure represents 434 authors divided into 5 clusters. Normalization method: LinLog/modularity; Network Visualization Weights: Citations.

The most influential authors by cluster (according to the number of citations) in the journals about and from América Latina, 2006-2018
Journals ABOUT Latin America
  Social Movements   Parties/Populism   Liberal Democracy   Political Institutions  
Cluster Rank Cluster 1 (red) N 2 (green) N 3 (blue) N 4 (yellow) N
1st Tilly, C.* (3) 174 Levitsky, S. (2) 219 O’Donnell, G.* (6) 146 Mainwaring, S.* (1) 291
2nd Bourdieu, P.* (7) 144 Weyland, K. (4) 173 Seligson, M. A. 116 Samuels, D.* (5) 155
3rd Portes, A. (9) 135 Roberts, K. M. (8) 141 Przeworski, A.* 106 Hunter, W. 131
4th Tarrow, S. (10) 132 Huber, E. 100 Linz, J. 87 Jones, M. 113
5th Escobar, A. 129 Kitschelt, H. 98 Putnam, R. 83 Shugart, M. 111
Journals FROM Latin America
  Political Institutions   Political/Soc. Theory   Liberal democracy   Delib. Democracy  
Cluster Rank Cluster 1 (yellow) N 2 (red) N 3 (blue) N 4 (green) N
1st Mainwaring, S.* (4) 426 Bourdieu, P.* (1) 596 Przeworski, A.* (9) 273 Habermas, J. (3) 512
2nd Limongi, F. (8) 290 Foucault, M. (2) 588 O’Donnell, G.* (10) 270 Avritzer, L. (7) 304
3rd Figueiredo, A. 243 Laclau, E. (5) 420 Norris, P. 266 Tilly, C.* 252
4th Samuels, D.* 221 Weber, M. (6) 346 Dahl, R. 260 Miguel, L. F. 196
5th Sartori, G. 206 Marx, K. 248 Inglehart, R. 214 Rawls, J. 168
Source: Prepared by the authors based on database Bittencourt and Codato, 2020. Note: * repeating terms in the two highlighted groups. Numbers in parentheses indicate the position of the respective author in the group of journals by number of citations. The first 10 most cited authors in each group were indicated.

Figure 04 shows four clusters. On the right and in the center of the map, the yellow, green, and blue clusters refer to PS (Mainwaring, Levistsky and O’donnell). The geographical proximity and the number of lines connecting these three clusters is an indicator that they belong to a shared knowledge domain. They are well separated from the large red area on the left in the citation network. In general terms, the authors in the red cluster are from political sociology.

Figure 05 shows a very well-ordered knowledge structure around four clusters whose central authors are: Scott Mainwaring (in the yellow cluster, 426 citations), in the red cluster Pierre Bourdieu (596 cit.), Michel Foucault (588 cit.) and Ernesto Laclau (420 cit.), Jürgen Habermas (green cluster, 512 cit.), and in the blue cluster Adam Przeworski (273 cit.) and Guillermo O’Donnell (270 cit.). The division here is roughly between three different disciplinary cultures: 01. a mainstream PS represented by the yellow and blue clusters on the map; 02. a political sociology (green cluster), whose central issue seems to be democratic participation; and 03. a political/social theory in which the reference authors (red cluster) are commonly used as a theoretical framework in articles of sociological interpretation (in addition to Bourdieu, Foucault, Marx, Weber, Gramsci, Arendt, Bauman, Castells, Giddens, etc).

Table 07 shows the order of importance of the authors according to the volume of citations in each group of journals. In political science ‘about’ Latin America, of the first five, four are political scientists – Mainwaring (1st), Levitsky (2nd), Weyland (4th), and Samuels (5th). In research articles published in academic journals ‘from’ Latin America, in the list of most important references, four out of five authors are social theorists: Bourdieu (1st), Foucault (2nd), Habermas (3rd), and Laclau (5th).

Table 07 provides one last relevant piece of information. Based on the work style and the interaction of the most cited authors in each cluster in Figures 04 and 05, we defined the thematic areas of these two knowledge networks.

Political Science ‘about’ Latin America is more ‘disciplinary’. There are three major typical PS subject areas – political institutions, liberal democracy, and political parties – and a topic of traditional interest in political sociology: social movements. PS ‘from’ Latin America is less strict. In addition to the issues of representative and deliberative democracy, and the classic problem of the functioning of political institutions, there is a large area where social theorists comprise the analytical foundation (with the expressive presence of Weber and Marx).

 Conclusions, limitations and lines of future research

The main contribution of this article was to present an overview of Latin American Political Science, as a countercurrent to the dominant analyses in the area focused on national case studies and the reconstruction of the discipline’s historical institutionalization process. We explored differences and similarities from a comparative analysis between the native PS of Latin America and the foreign PS. One concern was to establish a more recent time frame (2006-2018) to encompass the events of the past decade. Another novelty was to apply bibliometric measures combined with network analysis to handle a large volume of sources, authors, and references in order to detect the patterns in this literature.

By measuring the distance and proximity between journals, we access the underlying institutional structure of this scientific field. By using academic journals as markers, we single out the existence of informal, feudalized communities and the reasons for their existence. Through the map of co-occurring terms in titles and abstracts, we express the dominant research themes and methodological approaches. Lastly, the map of the cited authors in the 103,334 bibliographic references of the 23 journals from ten different countries indicates the intellectual traditions that structure this field.

Table 08 presents the main findings and answers the three questions formulated in the Introduction.

The knowledge structure of Latin American Political Science
The Institutional Structure Organized in the form of an archipelago: three well-defined journal communities separated by the language of publication (Portuguese, English, and Spanish); these communities have more connections with each other than between any two of them.
The Conceptual Framework Attested the existence of two major divisions – thematic and methodological – that structure the production of Latin American political science: political science and quantitative methods, on the one hand, and political sociology and qualitative methods, on the other.
The Intellectual Structure This division between political sociology and political science is partially confirmed and replicated through the analysis of authors’ citations. The difference here is that journals published outside Latin America typically cite more authors from political science; journals published in Latin America cite more sociologists and social philosophers, revealing the importance of the area of political and social theory.
Source: Prepared by the authors.

This is still an exploratory, descriptive, and comparative study of a large number of items. The type of unit (journals and papers), the investigation technique (bibliometrics), the treatment of information (quantitative) and its exclusive source (the Scopus database) present some limitations. These limitations include the representativeness of the universe and the validity of the measure to select political science articles, in addition to the specific inaccuracies derived from scientometric approaches.

We worked solely with the metadata of articles, excluding, for example, books. Furthermore, due to the nature of the data and the type of treatment, it was not possible to discuss the substantive content of these articles. Thus, we tried to calculate this content indirectly, based on recurring terms in titles and abstracts. But titles are not always accurate or very descriptive of the themes of the articles, and abstracts can be very vague, not detailing, for example, methodologies of analysis. If used in isolation, scientometrics may not be the most appropriate technique for mapping production in the social sciences.

Journals both ‘from’ and ‘about’ Latin America are publications that include articles on sociology, anthropology, history, social theory, economics, and law studies. Given their multidisciplinary nature, the number of documents selected in the first screening (10,838) and the lack of standardization of the structure of the articles, it was impracticable to use manual methods to identify research articles strictly within the field of political science. We adopted an ad hoc solution to select PS papers. It is thus possible to question the validity of our method: to analyze articles where the term ‘politics’ and its variants (‘political’, ‘politician’) appear in abstracts. The corpus (5,880 articles) may be overestimated.

Henceforth, we may consider an agenda encompassing a longer period, more countries, a more representative number of journals, and a type of analysis able to access and explain the content of articles and other bibliographic sources. Adding other academic journals would significantly increase the reliability of our findings and allow us to more confidently express how this field of knowledge is hierarchized, enabling the formulation of explanatory hypotheses. An expansion of the timeframe spanning four decades would allow us to analyze the conceptual dynamics, thematic transformation, and the change (or not) in the reference base of authors over time

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Translated by Fraser Robinson

Political institutions (15%), Political behavior (15%), International Relations (14%), Comparative politics (13%), Public policy (12%), Social movements (11%), Methods (10%), and Political economy (8%). See Norris, 2020, Table 06 .

Both are about politics in Latin America. ‘About’, however, refers here to a specific characteristic: among all Political Science journals indexed in the database Scopus, only the eight studied by us are ‘about ’ Latin American politics.

For example, for the case of Argentina, see (D’ALESSANDRO, MEDINA and LEIRAS, 2015); for Brazil, (CARDOZO, 2016); for Chile, (GATICA, 2012); for Colombia, (LEYVA and RAMÍREZ, 2015); and for Mexico, (BARRIENTOS DEL MONTE, 2017).

The essay by Bulcourf et al. (2014) is one exception as it historically contextualizes the construction of PS in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Barrientos del Monte’s book (2014) is another exception to the rule. The author conducted an in-depth historical analysis of the intellectual tensions that shaped the discipline in the region with information from almost 20 countries.

For the definition of scientometrics as a science map, see Mingers and Leydesdorff (2015).

One of the rare studies that used a bibliometric approach for comparative studies of national political sciences was (JOKIĆ, MERVAR and MATELJAN, 2019).

The sample included the following journals: Latin America Hoy, Revista de Ciencias Sociales, Revista Uruguaya de Ciencia Política, POSTData, Colombia Internacional, Revista de Ciencia Política, and Politics and Government. On the other hand, for a list of the most important comparative works about the region see (BENTANCUR and MANCEBO, 2017).

The journals examined by the authors were: América Latina Hoy, Dados, Revista de Ciencias Sociales, Revista POSTData, Revista Colombia Internacional, Perfiles Latinoamericanos, Opinião Pública, Política y Gobierno, Revista de Sociologia e Política, Analisis Político, Revista de Estudios Políticos, Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, Convergência, Política y Sociedad, Andamios, Revista Española de Ciencia Política, Latin American Research Review, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, Revista de Estudios Sociales, Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Ciad, Argos, Cepal, and Revista de Ciencia Política.

The journals analyzed by the author were: American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and Comparative Politics.

Since the 2000s, there has been a significant increase in Latin American journals on sociology and political science incorporated into Scopus. In the category 'Political Science and International Relations' we found three journals in 2000, nine in 2010, and 16 in 2018. In 'Sociology and Political Science': 2000 (two journals, but none on PS), 2010 (21 journals), and 2018 (38 journals). For summary data on the social sciences, see Buquet (2013, , Graph 01, p. 08).

Table 09 in the Annex presents more complete data for each journal: total number of documents found in Scopus, total number of articles, total number of articles for the analyzed period, number of articles containing the term politic* in their abstracts, and the window citation, since not all journals are indexed in the database from 2006 to 2018. The journals were ordered according to the 2018 SCImago Scientific Journal Rank indicator.

Data on the journals of the study corpus
Journals Country SJR 2018 Total No. of Scopus docs No. of Scopus articles No. 2006-2018 No. ‘politic*’ docs % Total ‘politic*’ Citation Window
from Latin America                
Política y Gobierno Mexico 0.535 184 123 117 117 1.99% 2006-2018
Opinião Pública Brazil 0.534 275 272 265 262 4.46% 2006-2018
Revista de Sociologia e Política Brazil 0.480 480 437 437 437 7.43% 2006-2018
Dados Brazil 0.339 605 572 363 345 5.87% 2006-2018
Revista de Ciencia Política Chile 0.281 439 407 397 397 6.75% 2006-2018
Revista de Estudios Sociales Colombia 0.245 540 449 443 330 5.61% 2009-2018
Analisis Político Colombia 0.244 309 299 299 299 5.09% 2007- 2012;14-18
Lua Nova Brazil 0.239 410 374 366 324 5.51% 2006-2018
Izquierdas Chile 0.219 376 153 134 127 2.16% 2013-2018
Perfiles Latinoamericanos Mexico 0.172 235 156 138 119 2.02% 2008-2017
Rev. Mex. de C. Polít. y Sociales Mexico 0.169 288 241 192 192 3.27% 2014-2018
Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana Venezuela 0.152 506 445 445 263 4.47% 2008-2018
Colombia Internacional Colombia 0.147 226 152 140 133 2.26% 2011-2018
Reforma y Democracia Venezuela 0.145 242 185 185 167 2.84% 2008-2018
Gestión y Política Pública México 0.123 312 296 172 180 3.06% 2006-2018
subtotal   0.279* 5,427 4,561 4,093 3,692 62.79%  
about Latin America                
Latin American Politics and Society United States 0.710 465 439 327 327 5.56% 2006-2018
Journal of Latin American Studies United Kingdom 0.484 1,032 836 210 201 3.42% 2006-2018
Latin American Perspectives United States 0.479 1,445 1,155 617 590 10.03% 2006-2018
Latin American Research Review United States 0,460 878 760 422 381 6.48% 2006-2016
Journal of Politics in Latin America Germany 0.452 66 64 58 58 0.99% 2015-2018
Bulletin of Latin American Research United Kingdom 0.332 842 765 377 325 5.53% 2006-2018
Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Canada 0.148 492 439 172 161 2.74% 2006-2011;14-18
América Latina Hoy Spain 0.129 191 166 162 145 2.47% 2011-2018
subtotal   0.399* 5411 4,624 2,345 2,188 37.22%  
Total     10,838 9,185 6,438 5,880 100.00  

Source: Prepared by the authors based on the database Bittencourt and Codato, 2020.

Note:*average; SJR = SCImago Journal Rank Indicator (measure of impact, influence, or prestige).

Political sociology, under the definition of Sartori (1969), is an interdisciplinary hybrid that combines the analysis of political facts, variables typical of sociology (social structures and processes), and variables typical of political science (political institutions). Looking at the word networks (Figures 02 and 03) and authors (Figures 04 and 05), we detect the presence of terms/authors more associated with sociology, but whose object is politics. Hence, 'Political Sociology'.

Paulo Scarpa