Mapping the Structure and Temporal Development of Social Cognition Research in Scopus from 1974 to 2025

This record contains the submitted manuscript and all supporting materials for Mapping the structure and temporal development of social cognition research in Scopus from 1974 to 2025 (Rivas-García, Villalobos, Povedano-Montero, & Caracuel, 2026). The study mapped 57,670 Scopus records on social cognition published from 1974 through 2025. The records were retrieved with a construct-based search covering theory of mind, mentalization, social perception, attribution, empathy, joint attention, and interpersonal emotion processing, and they were screened with rule-based eligibility criteria and targeted AI-assisted checks. The analyses describe annual growth, geographic and institutional distribution, author productivity (Lotka), source dispersion (Bradford), coauthorship and author-keyword networks, and temporal changes in construct representation. Contents Manuscript: the submitted version of the article (preprint, not peer reviewed). Title page: authors, affiliations, ORCID identifiers, and declarations. Supplementary material: search strategy, operational screening rules, deduplication procedure, record-selection accounting, and extended analytic specifications. Analysis code: annotated description of the analysis scripts. Highlights: summary of the main findings. Dashboard_cognicion_social_public.html: a self-contained interactive dashboard that works offline in any current web browser. It reproduces the eight manuscript figures in interactive form and includes a visualization studio based on aggregated counts by year and category. The data and code package can also be downloaded from within the dashboard. Replication_package_public.zip: the identifiers (Scopus EID and DOI) of the included records; the screening decision and coded reason for each of the 119,633 retrieved records; the derived data underlying all tables and figures; the keyword thesaurus and normalization dictionaries; and the Python analysis code, with a README describing each file and how to reproduce the analyses. Data availability note. The bibliographic records were obtained from Scopus (Elsevier) under an institutional subscription. Under the Scopus terms of use, the exported records (titles, abstracts, author lists, affiliations, keywords, and record-level citation counts) cannot be redistributed and are not included. Researchers with Scopus access can retrieve the same records using the identifiers provided or the search strategy reported in the manuscript (Appendix A). Citation counts reflect the Scopus snapshot of September 22, 2026. Screening was not independently validated by human coders. See the manuscript for the full methods and limitations.