Parochialism and Its Meanings in the Latin American Social Sciences: Experiments with Web of Science and SciELO

Abstract

In this article, we discuss parochialism in the social sciences (anthropology, political science, and sociology) via scientific indexing data. We take parochialism to mean the discussion of problems and themes related to the researchers’ national societies. To this end, we selected from the Web of Science and SciELO databases documents that have at least one author with institutional affiliation in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, or Mexico, from 2002 to 2021, totaling 175,821 documents. Based on scientometric techniques, text mining, and network analysis, we propose a multilevel approach to the topic of parochialism in the social sciences. The results point to close degrees of parochialism in all the selected national cases, varying in meaning according to the level of analysis (coauthorship, bigrams, and bibliographic references).