The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in the Field of Bibliometrics: A Mixed- Methods Approach

Other conference contribution, 2020

Pierre Bourdieu was undoubtedly one of the leading sociologists of science, yet his influence of the quantitative studies of science has largely gone unnoticed. The present study is the first step in a PhD project aimed at developing new bibliometric analytical approaches from his sociology. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were employed. Bourdieu’s influence was studied using publication and citation data of the bibliometrics literature that cites his works, descriptive statistics, and clustering techniques (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017). Subsequently, qualitative methods were applied. Central concepts in Bourdieu’s analytical framework constituted the classification scheme that was used in the deductive coding of the citing documents’ full texts in NVivo. At a later stage, the close reading of all texts with high occurrence of codes, variation across the coding scheme, or both, yielded the preliminary results to be presented at the workshop. The following is noteworthy: (a) there is a limited in-depth engagement with Bourdieu’s sociology within bibliometrics (b) the concepts of ‘field’, ‘symbolic capital’, and ‘social capital’ being the most occurring; (c) the presence, although far sparser, of a broader array of concepts from his sociology, such as economic capital, cultural capital, habitus, social class, illusio, and power (Bourdieu, 2000). In the oral presentation, findings from both the bibliometric analyses and the qualitative approach are compared and problematized.