Tu Vuò Fà L’Americano: the thematic history of the Revista de Sociologia e Política

ABSTRACT

Introduction:

Academic journals are legitimate scientific mediators in academic communities. They operate as institutional markers to define discipline boundaries, research domains, and areas of knowledge. As a field of study, they allow us to understand intellectual routines, research topics, and the rise or decline of analytical models over time. This article addresses these topics by exploring the thematic changes in the Brazilian journal Revista de Sociologia e Política over its three decades of existence.

Materials and Methods:

Using bibliometric techniques, we analyzed the metadata of 746 documents published between November 1993 (issue number 1) and December 2019 (issue number 72). Two types of analysis were performed: 1) co-occurrence of terms in the titles andABSTRACT of the published papers; 2) co-cited authors in the bibliographic references.

Results:

The data revealed a marked change in the journal’s profile, which shifted from covering a wide array of topics within the social sciences, political history, and social theory to become a specialized publication focused on Political Science and its mainstream agenda. We describe this process metaphorically as the “Americanization” of the Revista de Sociologia e Politica.

Discussion:

The ascension of traditional Political Science themes (such as political parties, elections, legislative studies, etc.), grounded on empirical and quantitative approaches, both mirrors and documents the transformations within Brazilian Political Science at large at the beginning of the 21^st century.

KEYWORDS:
intellectual history; Political science; scientometrics; bibliometrics; scientific journal