Scopus 1900-2020: Growth in articles, abstracts, countries, fields, and journals

© 2022 The Authors. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00177Scientometric research often relies on large-scale bibliometric databases of academic journal articles. Long term and longitudinal research can be affected if the composition of a database varies over time, and text processing research can be affected if the percentage of articles with abstracts changes. This article therefore assesses changes in the magnitude of the coverage of a major citation index, Scopus, over 121 years from 1900. The results show sustained exponential growth from 1900, except for dips during both world wars, and with increased growth after 2004. Over the same period, the percentage of articles with 500+ character abstracts increased from 1% to 95%. The number of different journals in Scopus also increased exponentially, but slowing down from 2010, with the number of articles per journal being approximately constant until 1980, then tripling due to megajournals and online-only publishing. The breadth of Scopus, in terms of the number of narrow fields with substantial numbers of articles, simultaneously increased from one field having 1000 articles in 1945 to 308 in 2020. Scopus’s international character also radically changed from 68% of first authors from Germany and the USA in 1900 to just 17% in 2020, with China dominating (25%)

Power and Influence of Economists

Economists occupy leading positions in many different sectors including central and private banks, multinational corporations, the state and the media, as well as serving as policy consultants on everything from health to the environment and security. Power and Influence of Economists explores the interconnected relationship between power, knowledge and influence which has led economics to be both a source and beneficiary of widespread power and influence. The contributors to this book explore the complex and diverse methods and channels that economists have used to exert and expand their influence from different disciplinary and national perspectives. Four different analytical views on the role of power and economics are taken: first, the role of economic expert discourses as power devices for the formation of influential expertise; second, the logics and modalities of governmentality that produce power/knowledge apparatuses between science and society; third, economists as involved in networks between academia, politics and the media; and forth, economics considered as a social field, including questions of legitimacy and unequal relations between economists based on the detention of various capitals. The volume includes case studies on a variety of national configurations of economics, such as the US, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Mexico and Brazil, as well as international spaces and organisations such as the IMF. This book provides innovative research perspectives for students and scholars of heterodox economics, cultural political economy, sociology of professions, network studies, and the social studies of power, discourse and knowledge

Uncommon Knowledge: A History of Queer New Mexico, 1920s-1980s

New Mexico, the heart of the American Southwest, has been home to countless gay men and lesbians throughout the twentieth century. This dissertation explores the states LGBTQ past and investigates the connections and exchanges between urban and rural gay and lesbian identities, cultures, and political organizations in the 1920s through the 1980s. Using New Mexico as case study, I provide an alternative narrative to previous scholarship that focuses either exclusively on gay urban or gay rural lives and instead present an example of a migratory queer network where lesbians and gay men crisscrossed cities and country spaces. Gay and lesbian cultures and politics flowed in- and-out of New Mexico especially during the creation of art colonies in the twenties, the construction of the security state in the forties and fifties, and the development of intentional lesbian land and gay male radical faeries communities in the seventies. These pivotal moments show how lesbians and gay men opposed institutions and practices of heteronormativity, resisted the use of sexuality as a tool of discrimination, and challenged constructed binaries: hetero/homo, public/private, and rural/urban. Lastly, New Mexican gay and lesbian experiences expose the deep and diverse trajectories of the larger struggle for gay civil rights that informs contemporary definitions of equal rights in America

Uplift and Blame: Minority Parents in the Discourse of Professional Educators

This historical document analysis explores the professional discourse on minority parents in education during the Progressive (1900-1914), Post-Civil Rights/ESEA (1960-1974), and NCLB/Accountability Eras (1995-2009). Grounded theory was used to code and analyze 430 articles mentioning parents and/or home life from two peer-reviewed journals of education. Research questions asked which minority parents are of interest to educators in each era, how minority parenting roles are portrayed in the educational discourse, and why minority parents concern educators. Findings include a focus on immigrant parents in the Progressive Era and on African American and Hispanic parents in the Post-Civil Rights/ESEA and NCLB/Accountability Eras. While NCLB/Accountability Era racial/ethnic minority parents are commonly identified as Hispanic and African American, there is a shift away from racial/ethnic identifiers towards classifying parents by SES and marital status. Nonetheless, low SES and single-parent status are consistently associated with Hispanic and African-American identity, suggesting that race continues to matter in education. Across the three eras, concern with minority parent behavior and culture is portrayed as a corollary to concern with minority student outcomes. While the discourse pays some attention to structural factors affecting minority student outcomes, its overwhelming concern is with how educators can change parents. The motives for such a focus are considered in light of questions about 1) the efficacy of school-based parent programs; 2) the complex relationships among parenting style, parental involvement, SES, racial/ethnic identity, and student success; and 3) the benefits educators reap from engaging in a symbolic discourse about minority paren

Economics in Sweden

Economics in Sweden contains the results of one of the most comprehensive attempts to evaluate research in economics ever undertaken. A team of Swedish and international researchers, including Avinash K. Dixit, Seppo Honkapohja and Robert M. Slow, examined the structure of economics in Sweden and its results. They identified postgraduate education as a key area, and their findings will be of particular relevence at a time when many countries are restructuring their graduate education programme

On Historical Contextualisation: Some Critical Socio-Legal Reflections

This article examines the relationship of historico-legal studies to the wider context of socio-legal studies. It issues a challenge to rethink the nature and role of legal history in the light of socio-legal theory and the extent to which it out to be used by legal scholars. The discussion explores the benefits to socio-legal studies of interdisciplinarity. It suggests that historical reconstructions that contextualise the law should be properly acknowledged as a subgenre at least of the socio-legal movement, not simply perceived as an add-on methodology

Unhealthy trajectories: race, migration, and the formation of health disparities in the United States

This dissertation investigates race as a determinant of health trajectories for immigrants to the United States. Previous research suggests that integration into U.S. society can be detrimental to the health and mortality outcomes of many minority immigrant groups. Popular explanations for post-migration health changes have focused on individual-level mechanisms, such as behavioral changes associated with acculturation. I use multiple sources of data and a variety of quantitative methods to situate these changes in a context of racial inequality for three migrant groups. In my first case, I draw on historical data collected from the Vital Statistics of the United States and the U.S. Census to analyze the changing health trajectories associated with European immigrants’ transition from marginalized minorities to members of the white majority in the early 20th century. My second case draws on restricted-use data from the National Survey of American Life to test how interpersonal and institutionalized racial discrimination influence health patterns of black immigrants from the Caribbean. In my third case, I use population-level birth data from New York City (2000-2010) to investigate changes in birth outcomes associated with elevated anti-Muslim sentiment after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Taken together, these cases demonstrate how racial formation in the United States shapes patterns of post-migration outcomes. I find that marginalized European immigrants exhibited patterns of worsening mortality trajectories, but the overall gap between European immigrants and native-born whites narrowed as racial categories were redefined in the early 20th century. This pattern of intergenerational health improvement contrasts with the segmented trajectories of contemporary Caribbean black immigrants, whose health is shaped by experiences of both interpersonal and institutionalized racism. Similarly, rates of low birth weight births increased for Middle Eastern and Asian Indian immigrants in the decade after the attacks of September 11, 2001, likely due to increased experiences of discrimination. By tying health trajectories and outcome disparities to the construction and stratification of racial boundaries, I advance theory about the "upstream" social causes of health and illness and develop a framework for analyzing the sociohistorical formation of health disparities