You know how you built a big part of your dataset by finding papers that cited three key, critical articles? I’m worried that this might have created a bit of an echo chamber.
Think about it: if I’m writing a social science paper that’s heavily critical of the CE, I’m very likely to cite Hobson or Korhonen to ground my argument. But if I’m writing a different kind of social science paper, maybe one that’s more about policy implementation or business models from a sociological perspective, I might not feel the need to cite those specific, critique-focused sources. My reference list would look totally different.
And then, in your results, you find that the biggest quadrant is the critical, analytical/social one. Isn’t that exactly what your method was designed to find? It makes me wonder if the field is truly dominated by that perspective, or if your search strategy just made it look that way.
I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something about how the Scopus search balanced this out? But as it stands, this seems like a pretty big deal that could totally skew the map you’re trying to draw. What are your thoughts on this? Did this cross your mind while you were doing the analysis?