Mapping the intellectual and conceptual structure of research on CoDa in the 'Social Sciences' scientific domain. A bibliometric overview.

This article presents a bibliometric analysis and a mapping of the intellectual and conceptual structure of the research conducted on 'Compositional Data' (CoDa) in Social Sciences. Since the publication of John Aitchison's seminal documents on compositional data in 1982 and 1986, the scientific production of papers using compositional data methods in Social Sciences has increased exponentially in several fields. The purpose of this paper focuses on multiple categories of Social Sciences and offers a comprehensive approach through bibliometrics methods, of the application of CoDa since 1988. Using various bibliometric techniques of productivity and graphic mapping, this document determines the evolution that research in compositional data has experienced, the most relevant journals and the research topics that have been addressed in different fields of research, among other issues. The findings reveal that the publication of papers applying compositional data has increased exponentially over the last 30 years, highlighting the contributions that have been made by the fields of 'geosciences', 'geography' and 'geology', 'health' and 'environmental science' to this development. The Journal of Geochemical Exploration , the Journal of Archaeological Science , Archaeometry , the Journal of Archaeological Science - Reports , t he International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health are the main journals that have contributed to this development. Among other contributions of this work, we can highlight that it offers the intellectual, social, and conceptual structure of the research over a long period of time, gathering the growing literature of research progress on CoDa in Social Sciences. • The main fields of research in Social Sciences applying 'compositional data' • The most prolific journals in Social Sciences that publish documents using CoDa • The co-citation patterns among those journals • The main topics addressed in research on CoDa in Social Sciences and their evolution • The main authors, the collaboration among them and the journals where they publish [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]