Applied and/or Public Sociology? A Bibliometric Citation Network Analysis 2005 – 2017

Michael Burawoy’s 2004 ASA Keynote address and corresponding publication in the American Sociological Review marked the disciplinary arrival of public sociology (Burawoy 2005). With a strong stylistic emphasis on engaging... [ view full abstract ]

Michael Burawoy’s 2004 ASA Keynote address and corresponding publication in the American Sociological Review marked the disciplinary arrival of public sociology (Burawoy 2005). With a strong stylistic emphasis on engaging non-academic audiences of public and political concern, a surge of research seeking to realize this scholastic call-to-action quickly followed. However, in the decade since, public sociology’s relationship to the older intervention and practice-oriented tradition known as applied sociology remains unclear (Steele and Price 2007). Both sociological approaches share an emphasis on applying sociological knowledge in the field yet retain distinct institutional and theoretical approaches. The following citation analysis uses bibliographic methods to empirically analyze and visualize the references, keywords, institutions, and journals of this diverse bodies of research. Co-citations and shared references are used to construct a network which is then analyzed in terms of general cohesion and clustering patterns as a mean to describe the complex relationship between these two sociological currents. The Girvan Newman algorithm is employed to identify different research clusters. Findings suggest limited dialogue between the bulk of these two traditions stemming from their different research foci, scopes of interest, and corresponding institutional contexts.