Abstract It remains unclear how different academic disciplines conceptually interpret the social world. This study analyzed 1,283,449 abstracts published between 2002 and 2024 across twelve disciplines, ranging from the humanities to the natural and mathematical sciences: Sociology, History, the Humanities, Philosophy, Linguistics, Politics, Economics, Medicine, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics. Through a bibliometric analysis of 26,073 Sociology abstracts, we identified 23 "differentially frequent ideology-related keywords" (Top DIKs). Over the study period, ‘gender’ and ‘women’ rose to prominence, while keywords traditionally associated with macroscopic social structures or collective solidarity, such as ‘EU’ and ‘minority,’ exhibited a relative decline. The frequency of these gender-related keywords in Sociology increased steadily, eventually appearing in 7–9% of all publications. Notably, ‘gender’ demonstrated one of the highest rates of increase among all analyzed terms, transcending its specific classification as an ideology-related term. Other disciplines followed this upward trend starting in the early 2010s, albeit with lower absolute frequencies (1–4% in the human sciences; 0.2–2% in the natural and mathematical sciences). Furthermore, across all twelve disciplines, ‘women’ appeared approximately twice as frequently as ‘men.’ This trend was consistent with the structural asymmetry observed in Sociology, where research focus diverged from the real-world prevalence of systemic physical risks inherently tied to social maintenance. Local context-level co-occurrence analysis categorized these disciplines into five distinct clusters based on shared conceptual vocabularies. Group 1 (Sociology and the Humanities), Group 2 (History, Philosophy, and Linguistics), and Group 3 (Politics and Economics) collectively formed a broad human sciences cluster, while Group 4 (Biology and Medicine) and Group 5 (Physics and Mathematics) aligned as the natural and mathematical sciences. This classification highlights a profound affinity between Sociology and the humanities regarding their ideology-related discourse. This connection is further supported by the contextual diversity of gender-related keywords: whereas Medicine and Chemistry emphasized women’s healthcare and reproduction, Sociology prioritized women’s rights. In contrast, the usage of ‘green’ in Chemistry showed a linear increase throughout the period, reaching 3.5% of publications. The human sciences exhibited rapid growth in this area after 2019, nearly converging with the levels observed in Chemistry, though co-occurrence patterns revealed a notable semantic divergence. Regarding ‘green,’ economics and the humanities formed a tight cluster, differing from the ‘gender’ and ‘women’ patterns where Sociology and the humanities were more closely aligned. Collectively, these findings provide a data-driven framework for understanding the evolution and dissemination of ideology-related keywords, underscoring the structural dominance of specific issues. These shifts reflect a transformation in how academic disciplines engage with societal concerns, highlighting how the apparent ubiquity of terms can mask divergent conceptual frameworks across interdisciplinary boundaries.
Clark Thesis (Sun,) studied this question.