The emergence of computational social science: Intellectual integration or persistent fragmentation?

Abstract Has the emerging field of computational social science grown increasingly intellectually integrated over time, or does the field remain fragmented into several distinct epistemic communities? Because research literature is still inconclusive in this regard, we use data about citations to study the development of the intellectual structure of computational social science. The findings suggest that network science has maintained a central position in computational social science over the years. Contrary to common perceptions, however, the field has not become more integrated over time. Rather, the network of co-citations among the field’s key authors exhibits increasing clustering and greater average path length over 2000-2020, indicating that computational social science is fracturing into various subcommunities, with loose connections to each other.