The relative (in)visibility of sociologists in the French, American, British, and German national fields (1970–2018)

In this article, we analyze the relative (in)visibility of authors in four countries that are central to the global production of sociology: France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. A cross-comparison of these national fields shows that, although citation distributions consistently follow a power law, authors who are the most frequently cited in their national field are not necessarily those who are the most frequently cited abroad. Mapping the space of national and international visibility of authors in each analyzed country shows an invariant structure: a majority of authors are only visible nationally, fewer authors reach a large national visibility and relative international visibility, and even fewer authors reach a large national and international visibility. Thus, only a very few authors of the four countries achieve what we can call a ‘global’ visibility, which is associated with the production and circulation, through translations, of works of theoretical nature. Our findings generalize Etienne Ollion and Andrew Abbott’s analysis of the reception of French sociologists in the field of American sociology, by showing that their results have nothing specific to the French case and rather constitute a very general result that applies to the distribution of citations within any national field.