Keywords Co-occurrence Analysis to Map New Topics and Recent Trends in Social Research Methods

Abstract

The new challenges arising from the complexity of contemporary society, the availability of different kinds of data and new data sources, in addition to the data analytics tools that merge different disciplines are contributing to a reconfiguration of Social Research Methods. This article aims to analyze the keywords of 985 scientific papers published from 2003 to 2018 in three main methodological journals in order to identify the trending topics and the leading edges of Social Research Methods. To do this, we carried out empirical research aimed at investigating the recurring themes and the possible new directions of this scientific domain by building and analyzing a bibliometric dataset through an analysis of keywords co-occurrence based on both network and factorial approaches.