Networks in Household and Population Socifal Sciences: Encouraging the Need for More Collaborations

Abstract Household and Population Social Sciences cover a high number of topics in Economics, but also in other fields such as Sociology, Psychology and Demography, among others. In this paper, we analyze the production and networks of a total of 6472 authors who have published 5070 papers in a selection of top cross-disciplinary journals (indexed in SSCI of WOS) which cover these topics of Household and Population Social Sciences between January 1969 and January 2021 (Journal of Population Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Feminist Economics, the Review of Economics of the Household, the Journal of Demographic Economics, Demography, Population and Development Review, and the European Journal of Population). Using the Impact Factor (IF) corresponding to the year of publication, our results first identify the academic leaders among those authors, as well as other results in terms of communities. Results reveal that the largest community is led by the sociologist Trude Lappegard; the community with the largest production is led by the economist Samuel H. Preston and the one associated with the most central author, the psychologist Ariel Kalil, is led by the economist Greg J. Duncan. Additionally, we note that collaborations among these authors are very rare, with only their first neighborhoods collaborating, which shows the need for greater collaboration between these social sciences to improve authors’ academic visibility.