Climate Change and Social Sciences: a bibliometric analysis

TL;DR

This paper conducts a bibliometric analysis to explore how social sciences address climate change, aiming to understand the development of new epistemologies and identify key contributors and journals in the field.

Contribution

It introduces an innovative method combining search, filtering, and analysis tools to examine climate change discourse within social science academic publications.

Findings

Identifies key journals and authors publishing on climate change in social sciences

Maps the development of climate change discourse in social sciences

Highlights the emergence of new epistemological perspectives

Abstract

The complexity of emergent wicked problems, such as climate change, culminates in a reformulation of how we think about society and mobilize scientists from various disciplines to seek solutions and perspectives on the problem. From an epistemological point of view, it is essential to evaluate how such topics can be developed inside the academic arena but, to do that, it is necessary to perform complex analysis of the great number of recent academic publications. In this work, we discuss how climate change has been addressed by social sciences in practice. Can we observe the development of a new epistemology by the emergence of the climate change debate? Are there contributions in academic journals within the field of social sciences addressing climate change? Which journals are these? Who are the authors? To answer these questions, we developed an innovative method combining different tools to search, filter, and analyze the impact of the academic production related to climate change in social sciences in the most relevant journals.