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This article examines publication patterns over the last seventy years from the American Sociological Review and American Journal of Sociology, the two most prominent journals in sociology. We reconstructed the gender of all published authors and each author’s academic pedigree. Results would suggest that these journals published disproportionally more articles by male authors and their coauthors. These gender inequalities persisted even when considering citations and after controlling for the influence of academic affiliation. It would seem that the potentially positive advantage of working in a prestigious, elite sociology department, in terms of better learning environment and reputational signal, for higher publication opportunities only significantly benefits male authors. While our findings do not mean that these journals have biased internal policies or implicit practices, this publication pattern needs to be considered especially regarding the possibility of their “social closure” and isomorphism.

Examining coauthorship networks is key to study scientific collaboration patterns and structural characteristics of scientific communities. Here, we studied coauthorship networks of sociologists in Italy, using temporal and multi-level quantitative analysis. By looking at publications indexed in Scopus, we detected research communities among Italian sociologists. We found that Italian sociologists are fractured in many disconnected groups. The giant connected component of the Italian sociology could be split into five main groups with a mixture of three main disciplinary topics: sociology of culture and communication (present in two groups), economic sociology (present in three groups) and general sociology (present in three groups). By applying an exponential random graph model, we found that collaboration ties are mainly driven by the research interests of these groups. Other factors, such as preferential attachment, gender and affiliation homophily are also important, but the effect of gender fades away once other factors are controlled for. Our research shows the advantages of multi-level and temporal network analysis in revealing the complexity of scientific collaboration patterns.

This article provides a quantitative analysis of peer review as an emerging field of research by revealing patterns and connections between authors, fields and journals from 1950 to 2016. By collecting all available sources from Web of Science, we built a dataset that included approximately 23,000 indexed records and reconstructed collaboration and citation networks over time. This allowed us to trace the emergence and evolution of this field of research by identifying relevant authors, publications and journals and revealing important development stages. Results showed that while the term “peer review” itself was relatively unknown before 1970 (“referee” was more frequently used), publications on peer review significantly grew especially after 1990. We found that the field was marked by three development stages: (1) before 1982, in which most influential studies were made by social scientists; (2) from 1983 to 2002, in which research was dominated by biomedical journals, and (3) from 2003 to 2016, in which specialised journals on science studies, such as Scientometrics, gained momentum frequently publishing research on peer review and so becoming the most influential outlets. The evolution of citation networks revealed a body of 47 publications that form the main path of the field, i.e., cited sources in all the most influential publications. They could be viewed as the main corpus of knowledge for any newcomer in the field.

Peer review is the defining feature of scholarly communication. In a 2018 survey of more than 11, 000 researchers, 98% said that they considered peer review important or extremely important for ensuring the quality and integrity of scholarly communication.

This article looks at 20 years of applications of agent-based models (ABMs) in sociology and, in particular, their explanatory achievements and methodological insights. These applications have helped sociologists to examine agent interaction in social outcomes and have helped shift analyses away from structural and aggregate factors, to the role of agency. They have improved the realism of the micro-behavioral foundations of sociological models, by complementing analytic modeling and game theory–inspired analyses. Secondly, they have helped us to dissect the role of social structures in constraining individual behavior more precisely than in variable-based sociology. Finally, simulation outcomes have given us a more dynamic view of the interplay between individual behavior and social structures, thus promoting a more evolutionary and process-based approach to social facts. Attention here has been paid to social norms, social influence, and culture dynamics, across different disciplines such as behavioral sciences, complexity science, sociology, and economics. We argue that these applications can help sociology to achieve more rigorous research standards, by promoting a modeling environment and providing tighter cross-disciplinary integration. Recently, certain methodological improvements toward model standardization, replication, and validation have been achieved. As a result, the impact of these models in sociology is expected to grow even more in the future. WIREs Comput Stat 2015, 7:284–306. doi: 10.1002/wics.1356 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

This paper aims to understand the influence of institutional and organisational embeddedness on research productivity of Italian sociologists. We looked at all records published by Italian sociologists in Scopus from 1973 to 2016 and reconstructed their co-authorship patterns. We built an individual productivity index by considering the number and type of records, the impact factor of journals in which these records were published and each record’s citations. We found that sociologists who co-authored more frequently with international authors were more productive and that having a stable group of co-authors had a positive effect on the number of publications but not on citations. We found that organisational embeddedness has a positive effect on productivity at the group level (i.e., sociologists working in the same institute), less at the individual level. We did not found any effect of the scientific disciplinary sectors, which are extremely influential administratively and politically for promotion and career in Italy. With all caveats due to several limitations of our analysis, our findings suggest that internationalisation and certain context-specific organisational settings could promote scientist productivity .

This article investigates solidarity arising from economic exchange, by studying a multiplex network of collaboration, trust and social support. After a qualitative pre-study, we performed a full-network survey on a group of independent professionals sharing a coworking space and occasionally collaborating with each other. By running multivariate Exponential Random Graph Models, we showed that successful collaboration might not determine expectations of social support. However, these relationships were related to business-based trust ties, which were predicted by collaboration. Our results suggest that solidarity can emerge as a byproduct of peer economic exchange when trust mediates between professional relationships and expressive ties.

This paper examines research on peer review between 1969 and 2015 by looking at records indexed from the Scopus database. Although it is often argued that peer review has been poorly investigated, we found that the number of publications in this field doubled from 2005. A half of this work was indexed as research articles, a third as editorial notes and literature reviews and the rest were book chapters or letters. We identified the most prolific and influential scholars, the most cited publications and the most important journals in the field. Co-authorship network analysis showed that research on peer review is fragmented, with the largest group of co-authors including only 2.1% of the whole community. Co-citation network analysis indicated a fragmented structure also in terms of knowledge. This shows that despite its central role in research, peer review has been examined only through small-scale research projects. Our findings would suggest that there is need to encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing across different research communities.

L’approche par modeles multi-agents a travers quelques ouvrages fondamentaux L’article analyse quelques monographies fondamentales qui mettent en evidence la pertinence de la simulation multi-agents pour l’analyse sociologique. Ces ouvrages ont ete selectionnes au sein de travaux qui portent sur la cooperation, les dynamiques sociales et les normes. Ils montrent l’importance de modeliser les comportements complexes des acteurs et leurs interactions pour comprendre les regularites sociales ainsi que les raisons pour lesquelles la modelisation et l’abstraction sont importantes pour l’analyse sociologique. La modelisation multi-agents peut nous aider a produire des theories des phenomenes sociaux plus coherentes et verifiables et nous permet de mieux organiser les theories avant de les tester et en vue de les repliquer. Enfin, dans l’esprit d’une approche collaborative, cet article argumente en faveur du besoin de liens plus etroits entre les approches experimentales et la sociologie.

This article provides an overview of the social simulation approach to the study of social phenomena. We focus especially on the relevance of heterogeneity of social behavior and dynamics and the complex interplay of agent behavior and social structure. The article identifies the peculiarities and the explanatory achievements of this approach and then discusses its prospects and challenges. Special attention is given to (i) how micro-level behavioral detail can be used to understand social patterns and dynamics; (ii) the importance of the meso level of social networks; and (iii) the two-way, process linkages between micro and macro aspects as a fundamental source of social uncertainty and unpredictability.

This article aims to introduce a special issue on "Scientometrics of peer review", which collects papers originally presented at workshops and conferences organised by the COST ACTION TD1306 "New frontiers of peer review". Peer review is the cornerstone of science and is one of the underlying processes that bring about publication traces that are at the heart of bibliometric studies. Unfortunately, despite its importance, quantitative studies on peer review are still poorly developed, often due to lack of data. The issue aims to promote the establishment of peer review as an interdisciplinary field of research and stimulate further quantitative research.

This special issue on social simulation presents a collection of selected papers from the 5th conference of the European Social Simulation Association held in Brescia, Italy 1st to 5th September 2008. This collection includes multi-faceted research from this trans-disciplinary community that revolves around social simulation.

This paper aims to illustrate how social sciences, sociology in particular, have theorized on societal transitions. The first section introduces some preliminary definitions. The assumption is that a societal transition is more than a social, economic or technological change. It is a large-scale and long-term macro process through which a given social system radically changes its structural basis, in terms of new socio-technical practices, governance rules, social and economic institutions, cultural frames, and patterns of social life. The second section provides an excursus on social science accounts on transitions. In particular, the attention has been given to Norbert Elias' famous study on the rise and fall of the court society in France, between 17th and 18th century and to Manuel Castells' recent analysis of the emergence of the network society. The third section discusses problems and challenges of standard approaches and suggests some building blocks of societal transition models, taken from complexity and social simulation literature. The concluding section suggests some way-forward measures towards a computational social science approach to societal transitions.

This paper deals with the pivotal role played by community development corporations (CDCs) in local economic initiatives from the bottom-up. These non-profit organizations are challenging the top-down approach of political decision making, mobilizing community assets, connecting inside and outside resources, synthesizing visions, expertise and methods from private, public and community sectors. In doing so, they are demonstrating the relevance of non-profit organizations and institutions in fostering social capital and promoting collective action across different sectors and actors. To illustrate these arguments, this paper has reported two case studies of local economic development initiatives in North America that are centered on two CDCs. The positive effects and critical points of CDCs have been addressed.

There is an ongoing debate on whether discrimination exists or not, and, if yes, in which forms. This chapter concentrates only on observed inequalities that are the direct consequences of hiring decisions. A variety of explanations have been provided to try to understand why discrimination tends to persist. A shift of focus toward psychological and structural mechanisms provides valuable insights for sociological investigations on labor market inequalities. The chapter focuses on two particular mechanisms. First, it analyzes whether priming individuals with a positive view on groups involved could decrease discriminatory bias. The second mechanism is more sociological and more in line with the idea of exploring social mechanisms which could increase or decrease discrimination. The chapter discusses certain findings that do not unequivocally support the statistical generalization of the hypothesized mechanisms, which is what one can expect generally in any empirical investigation of social mechanisms.

Commons dilemmas are interaction situations where a common good is provided or exploited by a group of individuals so that optimal collective outcomes clash with private interests. Although in these situations, social norms and institutions exist that might help individuals to cooperate, little is known about the interaction effects between positive and negative incentives and exit options by individuals. We performed a modified public good game experiment to examine the effect of exit, rewards and punishment, as well as the interplay between exit and rewards and punishment. We found that punishment had a stronger effect than rewards on cooperation if considered by itself, whereas rewards had a stronger effect when combined with voluntary participation. This can be explained in terms of the 'framing effect', i.e., as the combination of exit and rewards might induce people to attach higher expected payoffs to cooperative strategies and expect better behaviour from others.

This paper looks at the relationship between negative news and stock markets in times of global crisis, such as the 2008/2009 period. We analysed one year of front page banner headlines of three financial newspapers, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Il Sole24ore to examine the influence of bad news both on stock market volatility and dynamic correlation. Our results show that the press and markets influenced each other in generating market volatility and in particular, that the Wall Street Journal had a crucial effect both on the volatility and correlation between the US and foreign markets. We also found significant differences between newspapers in their interpretation of the crisis, with the Financial Times being significantly pessimistic even in phases of low market volatility. Our results confirm the reflexive nature of stock markets. When the situation is uncertain and unpredictable, market behaviour may even reflect qualitative, big picture, and subjective information such as streamers in a newspaper, whose economic and informative value is questionable.

This paper looks at eight comparative case-studies on academic entrepreneurs in life sciences conducted in Europe in 2008. The interviewees were selected from the KEINS database that lists all academic inventors from Italy, France, Sweden and the Netherlands who have one or more patent applications registered at the European Patent Office, 1978–2004. The case-studies show that institutions largely influence the way in which scientists are coping with the normative uncertainty typical of science and technology systemic boundaries in the life sciences today. By exploring new local solutions, the entrepreneurial achievements of scientists are also establishing new institutional practices. Our empirical analysis helps to reconsider traditional dichotomies in the sociological, economic and institutional literature, such as publications versus patents and academia versus industry, and to illustrate the creative role of academic entrepreneurs.

There is strong evidence that computer simulation is increasingly recognized as an important analytical tool in many social sciences disciplines and fields. During the last ten years, a number of new journals, which are devoted to this field, have been founded and others have increased their influence (i.e., JASSS, CMOT, Social Science Computer Review, Autonomous Agent and Multi-Agent Systems, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Computational Economics, Computational Management Science). Special issues and extensive reviews of the literature have been published in influential and standard journals. At the same time, new international associations and societies were born, with an increasing number of members (i.e., ESSA in Europe, NAACSOS in North America, The Society for Computational Economics), many research centers and institutes have been successfully launched, many workshops, conferences and congresses are organized every year (with the first world congress on social simulation held in 2006 in Tokyo and the second one in Washington in 2008), and an open market of tools and simulation platforms (i.e., Swarm, Repast, Ascape, NetLogo), based on a vast community of developers and users, is steadily growing.

After an introduction of the theoretical framework and concepts of transition studies, this article gives an overview of how structural change in social systems has been studied from various disciplinary perspectives. This overview first leads to the conclusion that computational and mathematical approaches and their practical form, modeling, up till now, have been almost absent in the research and theorizing of structural change or transitions in social systems. Second, this review of the social science literature suggests numerous theoretical constructs relevant for transition modeling. Relevant concepts include the conceptualization of the micro-to-macro link, the importance of explaining both stability and change, quantitative and qualitative definitions of structural change, the use of dichotomies, synchronic and diachronic reasoning in explaining structural change, definitions of basic patterns of social change, the conceptualization of resistance to change and intentional and normative aspects of social change. This article employs these theoretical concepts to describe and discuss the models presented in this special issue in order to develop an understanding of what exactly entails a computational or mathematical approach to societal transitions.