Mapping the Sociological Field: A Bibliometric Analysis of Thematic Shifts and Scholarly Patterns, 2010-2024

Over the past few decades, sociology has experienced significant thematic and structural changes due to the rapid advancement of technology, growing social inequality, and changing forms of mobility and governance. The period 2010–2024 offers a significant window, spanning post-2008 economic restructuring, platform capitalism, COVID-19, and shifts in digital data infrastructures. Using bibliometric data and transformer-based topic modeling analysis, this study examines authorship patterns, institutional concentration, and thematic developments in 101,005 sociology articles published between 2010 and 2024. Our findings reveal that the University of Oxford leads in publication output (910 papers), while Ethnic and Racial Studies is the most prolific journal (3,214 papers). Gender distribution among authors is nearly balanced (50.4% female, 49.6% male), though ethnicity analysis shows significant disparities with White, non-Latino researchers comprising 61% of authorship. BERTopic analysis identified ten major research topics, with social theory and financial critique emerging as the dominant theme (9,016 documents). Temporal analysis demonstrates declining prominence of traditional theoretical topics and growing interest in mental sociology and gender studies. By mapping these patterns, the study offers an empirical foundation for understanding how sociology responds to broader societal changes and contributes to debates on equity, disciplinary boundaries, and future research trajectories.