Top research fronts in the social sciences

	Research front	Papers	Citations	Impact	Mean year
1	European early modern humans and radiocarbon dating	48	1,842	38.38	2005.9
2	The H-Index and other citation performance measures	46	1,1	.63	2006.4
3	Relational and evolutionary economic geography	41	2,232	54.44	2004.4
4	International corporate governance and market value	34	1,699	49.97	2004.9
5	Ethnicity, natural resources and violent civil conflict	32	1,561	48.78	2005.2
6	Personality (Axis-II) disorders and the development of psychopathy	30	1,671	55.70	2005.7
7	World, national mental-health surveys and the prevalence of disease	22	3,257	148.05	2004.7
8	Acute psychosocial work stress: effort-reward imbalance model	22	1,710	77.73	2004.7
9	IT acceptance and consumer trust	17	1,352	79.53	2004.3
10	Depression and mental-health conditions affecting US employers	8	1,518	189.75	2003.8

A research front is a group of highly cited papers, referred to as core papers, in a specific area of research defined by co-citation cluster analysis. This analysis determines the number of times pairs of highly cited

papers have been co-cited. Clusters are formed by selecting all papers that can be linked together by a specified co-citation threshold. This methodology reveals “organic” structures by relying on the connections made by researchers themselves, not on word analysis or field-classification schemes undertaken by literature analysts. The clusters are named using a semi-automatic process based on frequently occurring words and phrases. Statistical characteristics of each cluster are also determined, including the number of core papers,

the sum of their citation frequencies, the average citations per paper (impact) and the mean year of the core papers in the front. The number of highly cited papers gives an indication of the size of the foundation literature. The sum of citation frequencies reflects the size of the research front. The citations-per-paper score shows the degree of concentration. Finally, the mean year of papers indicates the currency, or “hotness”, of the cluster. The table above provides the top ten research fronts in the social sciences, as defined by the number of core papers (eight or more) and their citation counts (1,000 or more).