2025/02/21 by Yves Gingras, Mahdi Khelfaoui · 2 voices · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Archaeology #Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice #Geography #German #German Social Sciences and History #History #Meteorology #Political science #Social and Cultural Dynamics #Visibility
paper · doi:10.1177/05390184251317451
published in Social Science Information 64(1), 32-59 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2025/02/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
In this article, we analyze the relative (in)visibility of authors in four countries that are central to the global production of sociology: France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. A cross-comparison of these national fields shows that, although citation distributions consistently follow a power law, authors who are the most frequently cited in their national field are not necessarily those who are the most frequently cited abroad. Mapping the space of national and international visibility of authors in each analyzed country shows an invariant structure: a majority of authors are only visible nationally, fewer authors reach a large national visibility and relative international visibility, and even fewer authors reach a large national and international visibility. Thus, only a very few authors of the four countries achieve what we can call a ‘global’ visibility, which is associated with the production and circulation, through translations, of works of theoretical nature. Our findings generalize Etienne Ollion and Andrew Abbott’s analysis of the reception of French sociologists in the field of American sociology, by showing that their results have nothing specific to the French case and rather constitute a very general result that applies to the distribution of citations within any national field.