Tracing Three Decades of Sociological Research: A Computational Abstract Analysis to Identify Latent Topics of Sociological Research Online

Disciplinary boundaries and the trends within them are essential for research identities across the discipline and fields. To analyze the state of British sociology in general and Sociological Research Online in particular, we analyzed a corpus of abstracts of published articles from 2000 to 2022. By applying an unsupervised topic modeling approach, we identify 15 latent topics across all abstracts, representing a broad range of sociological topics. We use the topic-per-document proportions for each document to fit linear probability models to reveal time trends and disparate trends between authorship residences. We observe a consistency over time for most topics, but a significant decline in the ‘public discourse and values’ and ‘migration, ethnic communities, conflict’ and a significant increase in ‘transnational organizations, solidarity and fair trade’, ‘globalism and universalism’, and ‘sociology of education’. Differences between UK and non-UK authors are most pronounced for ‘local UK case studies’, which are increasingly treated by only UK authors, and ‘transnational organizations, solidarity and fair trade’, whose increase is mostly attributed to non-UK authors.