General Social Sciences papers

Pofolia’s corpus holds 67 papers from General Social Sciences (2012–2026), each with a short summary. Below, the 20 most-cited, then the most recently added.

At a glance

• Most cited: Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts (2013, 3,200 citations).
• The 20 papers listed have 19,440 citations between them.
• 15 of the 15 with a known journal quartile appeared in a Q1 journal.
• 4 have a free full text (open access).
• Most frequent journals: Communication Methods and Measures, Political Analysis, Academy of Management Annals.
• Published between 2012 and 2022.

Most cited

Ranked by citation count. Because citations accumulate over time, this list naturally leans towards work published a few years ago; for where the field is now, see “recently added”. How to read the signals

• Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts

  Political Analysis · 2013 · Q1 · SJR 4.00 · FWCI 1244.63 · 3,200 citations · Open access

  Automated text analysis methods offer a powerful way to reduce the cost of analyzing large political text collections, fulfilling a long-standing promise in political science.

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• Structural Topic Models for Open‐Ended Survey Responses

  American Journal of Political Science · 2014 · Q1 · SJR 6.00 · FWCI 550.55 · 1,949 citations

  This paper introduces the Structural Topic Model (STM), a semi-automated machine learning approach for analyzing open-ended survey responses, offering an alternative to traditional human coding.

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• stm: An R Package for Structural Topic Models

  Journal of Statistical Software · 2019 · Q1 · SJR 3.00 · FWCI 981.10 · 1,525 citations · Open access

  The 'stm' R package is introduced, enabling researchers to estimate structural topic models that incorporate document-level metadata using a fast variational approximation.

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• Theories of the Information Society

  2014 · FWCI 161.38 · 1,287 citations

  This book critically examines the concept of the 'Information Society,' arguing against its widespread adoption and instead advocating for an analysis of the 'informatization' of existing social structures.

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• Word embeddings quantify 100 years of gender and ethnic stereotypes

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2018 · Q1 · SJR 3.00 · FWCI 1161.85 · 1,103 citations

  Researchers developed a method using word embeddings trained on 100 years of US text data to quantify evolving gender and ethnic stereotypes.

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• Ten Steps in Scale Development and Reporting: A Guide for Researchers

  Communication Methods and Measures · 2017 · Q1 · SJR 2.00 · FWCI 339.20 · 1,088 citations

  This guide outlines 10 essential steps for researchers to improve the rigor and clarity of scale development and reporting, addressing common inconsistencies with best practices.

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• A Topic Modeling Comparison Between LDA, NMF, Top2Vec, and BERTopic to Demystify Twitter Posts

  Frontiers in Sociology · 2022 · Q1 · FWCI 649.31 · 905 citations · Open access

  This study evaluates four topic modeling techniques (LDA, NMF, Top2Vec, BERTopic) for analyzing Twitter data, finding BERTopic and NMF most effective.

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• La guerra contra las mujeres

  2016 · FWCI 475.52 · 868 citations

  This work argues that escalating violence against women, exemplified by systematic murders in Ciudad Juárez, is a global phenomenon linked to neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and unresolved modernity-coloniality.

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• Applying LDA Topic Modeling in Communication Research: Toward a Valid and Reliable Methodology

  Communication Methods and Measures · 2018 · Q1 · SJR 2.00 · FWCI 489.70 · 818 citations

  This paper proposes a standardized methodology to address key challenges in applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling for communication research, aiming to improve its validity and reliability.

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• Generational differences in the workplace: A review of the evidence and directions for future research

  Journal of Organizational Behavior · 2013 · Q1 · SJR 3.00 · FWCI 372.73 · 786 citations

  Research on generational differences in the workplace is largely descriptive and lacks theoretical depth, with inconsistent evidence making generalizations difficult.

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• A Model of Text for Experimentation in the Social Sciences

  Journal of the American Statistical Association · 2016 · Q1 · SJR 3.00 · FWCI 479.56 · 733 citations

  This paper introduces a hierarchical mixed membership model for text analysis that allows researchers to experimentally assess the drivers of topical content in documents.

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• Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data

  University of Minnesota Press eBooks · 2012 · FWCI 527.03 · 683 citations

  Big social data, defined by its massive size (dozens of terabytes to petabytes), presents both opportunities and challenges for the humanities and social sciences.

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• Computational Grounded Theory: A Methodological Framework

  Sociological Methods & Research · 2017 · Q1 · SJR 3.00 · FWCI 215.57 · 663 citations

  A new three-step framework, Computational Grounded Theory (CGT), integrates human interpretation with computational pattern detection for more rigorous content analysis of qualitative text data.

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• La sociedad del cansancio

  Herder eBooks · 2017 · FWCI 848.31 · 656 citations

  This philosophical text proposes that contemporary society has shifted from a disciplinary model to a 'burnout society' characterized by excessive positivity and self-exploitation.

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• Topic Modeling in Management Research: Rendering New Theory from Textual Data

  Academy of Management Annals · 2019 · Q1 · SJR 14.00 · FWCI 422.22 · 596 citations

  Topic modeling, a computational method from computer science, is increasingly used by management researchers to uncover new theories and conceptual relationships from textual data.

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• Beyond prediction: Using big data for policy problems

  Science · 2017 · Q1 · SJR 10.00 · FWCI 589.64 · 580 citations

  Machine learning excels at prediction, but bridging the gap to actual policy decisions requires understanding underlying assumptions for optimized data-driven outcomes.

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• Quantitative analysis of large amounts of journalistic texts using topic modelling

  Digital Journalism · 2015 · Q1 · SJR 3.00 · FWCI 201.78 · 529 citations

  Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling is proposed as a method to automatically organize and analyze vast archives of news content by identifying latent topics based on word patterns.

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• AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2012 · FWCI 178.09 · 494 citations

  David Hume's 1748 philosophical work argues that human knowledge is limited and heavily relies on non-rational mental habits, not pure reason.

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• Simultaneously Discovering and Quantifying Risk Types from Textual Risk Disclosures

  Management Science · 2014 · Q1 · SJR 6.00 · FWCI 252.70 · 489 citations

  A new topic modeling approach, a variation of Latent Dirichlet Allocation, can simultaneously discover and quantify risk types from corporate textual disclosures, outperforming existing methods.

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• Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics

  Political Analysis · 2015 · Q1 · SJR 4.00 · FWCI 402.69 · 488 citations · Open access

  This article introduces practical methods for analyzing textual data in comparative politics, focusing on cross-language challenges and demonstrating the Structural Topic Model (STM) with translated data.

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Recently added

• An empirical assessment of data sharing and computational reproducibility in sociology

  Royal Society Open Science · 2026 · Q1 · FWCI 15.74 · 1 citations

  Only 9.9% of sociology articles published between 2019-2024 in top journals provide replication packages, with just 22% of those fully reproducible, significantly lower than economics and political science.

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• Can Generative AI improve social science?

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024 · Q1 · SJR 3.00 · FWCI 368.77 · 244 citations · Open access

  Generative AI can enhance social science research methods like surveys, online experiments, and content analysis, but its biases and ethical challenges require open-source infrastructure to ensure quality and access.

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• Evolution of artificial intelligence research in Technological Forecasting and Social Change: Research topics, trends, and future directions

  Technological Forecasting and Social Change · 2023 · Q1 · SJR 3.00 · FWCI 338.13 · 312 citations

  AI research in Technological Forecasting and Social Change (TF&SC) reveals eight key topics, with healthcare, circular economy, consumer adoption, and decision-making showing rising trends.

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• A Topic Modeling Comparison Between LDA, NMF, Top2Vec, and BERTopic to Demystify Twitter Posts

  Frontiers in Sociology · 2022 · Q1 · FWCI 649.31 · 905 citations · Open access

  This study evaluates four topic modeling techniques (LDA, NMF, Top2Vec, BERTopic) for analyzing Twitter data, finding BERTopic and NMF most effective.

  Go to source →

• academictwitteR: an R package to access the Twitter Academic Research Product Track v2 API endpoint

  The Journal of Open Source Software · 2021 · FWCI 252.63 · 230 citations · Open access

  academictwitteR is a new R package that simplifies access to the Twitter Academic Research Product Track v2 API endpoint.

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• Word Embeddings: What Works, What Doesn’t, and How to Tell the Difference for Applied Research

  The Journal of Politics · 2021 · Q1 · SJR 3.00 · FWCI 194.31 · 245 citations

  Political science research using word embeddings shows results are generally robust to parameter choices (context window, dimensions, pretrained vs. local fit) across corpora and languages.

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• Machine Learning for Social Science: An Agnostic Approach

  Annual Review of Political Science · 2021 · Q1 · SJR 6.00 · FWCI 291.47 · 321 citations

  Social scientists can leverage machine learning (ML) for concept discovery, prevalence measurement, causal assessment, and prediction, shifting towards an inductive inference approach.

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• Gender and Representation Bias in GPT-3 Generated Stories

  2021 · 290 citations · Open access

  GPT-3 generated stories reflect gender stereotypes, associating feminine characters with family/appearance and describing them as less powerful than masculine characters, even when prompted with high-power verbs.

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Journals in this field

The journals that publish most of this field’s papers. Quartile (Q1–Q4), SJR and h-index are from SCImago Journal Rank; “in this field” is how many of the journal’s pooled papers belong here. What is a Q1 journal? · What is the h-index?

Every journal in General Social Sciences (Q1–Q4) →

Other subfields in Social Sciences

• Anthropology
• Archeology (Social Sciences)
• Geography, Planning and Development
• Demography
• Linguistics and Language
• Education
• Safety Research
• Law
• Communication
• Human Factors and Ergonomics
• Development
• Public Administration

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