Topic Tendencies in Global Studies: Beyond the Boundaries of Regions and Disciplines in 30 Years of Publication Using Bibliometrics

Abstract

Abstract This essay answers the research question: What are the main topic tendencies in Global Studies journals within 30 years of publication from 1989 to 2019? As Global Studies is an interdisciplinary field, the methodology being applied addresses the problem of analyzing fields of knowledge whose content shares research interests, objects of study and methods with others. I map the field, being aware of the crossroads between fields as an opportunity to show how, from the diversity of topics, fields nourish themselves from this intellectual richness and, at the same time, delineate their “own” space within the complex system of sciences. For this purpose, I use bibliometric tools for visualizing data such as VOSviewer and CiteSpace. The conclusions show (1) how an important percentage of content from Area Studies (Co-field of Global Studies) become “global” over time; (2) how disciplines merge through relationships among topics in global research; and (3) how topics about crisis, war, and health issues had already high occurrence degrees in the Global Studies field before the crisis of pandemics and war after 2019.