2020 Mapping The Evolution of Social Research and Data Science

Social Indicators Research
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02281-3
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Mapping the Evolution of Social Research and Data Science

on 30 Years of Social Indicators Research
Massimo Aria1 · Michelangelo Misuraca2 · Maria Spano1
Accepted: 26 January 2020

© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Social Indicators Research (SIR) year by year has consolidated its preeminent position in
the debate concerning the study of all the aspects of quality of life. The need of a journal
focused on the quantitative evaluation of social realities and phenomena dating back to the
seventies, when a new branch of Social Science—called Social Indicators Research—came
into the international scientific landscape. This paper aims at reviewing the whole collec-
tion of publications appeared on SIR from 1989 to 2018, providing a complete overview
of the main factor that affected the journal in the last 30 years. The approach followed to
analyse this extensive corpus of documents relies upon the theoretical framework of biblio-
metric studies.
Keywords Quality of life · Bibliometric analysis · Thematic analysis
1 Introduction
Founded in the mid-seventies of the 20th century, Social Indicators Research (SIR) year
after year has consolidated its preeminent position in the debate concerning the study of all
the aspects of quality of life. The scope of SIR is to publish empirical, philosophical and
methodological studies dealing with the whole spectrum of society, encompassing indi-
viduals, public and private organisations, geopolitical and economic systems at a national
as well as at an international level. Particular consideration is given to the construction of
different typologies of indicators, with the aim of evaluating social phenomena and reali-
ties that are increasingly complex, dynamical and interrelated.
* Michelangelo Misuraca
michelangelo.misuraca@unical.it
Massimo Aria
massimo.aria@unina.it
Maria Spano
maria.spano@unina.it
1
DiSES, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy
2
DiScAG, University of Calabria, Rende, Italy
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M. Aria et al.
In this framework, SIR tends to favour an interdisciplinary viewpoint to the study of

quality of life, offering its stage to a community of scholars and researchers coming from
different scientific domains and backgrounds.
Monitoring quality of life has a long tradition in the scientific landscape, going back to
the early fifties and to the interest of the United Nations in measuring populations’ levels of
living (Michalos 2014). Differently from the preceding periods, a newly formed branch of
Social Science—called Social Indicators Research—was specifically dedicated to measure
and analyse the welfare of a population in better and more differentiated ways than the ones
considered as standards until then. In this perspective, Social Indicators Research can be
considered as a primitive ‘Beyond GDP’ movement (Bleys 2012), seminal to the current
international debate on the measurement of well-being.
If we consider the huge literature related to this particular field—produced in Econom-
ics, Sociology, Political Science, Psychology, Medicine and so on—it is often hard to high-
light and understand the main differences among the keywords chosen to characterise the
different types of study. Various authors still use happiness, well-being, life satisfaction and
quality of life interchangeably, even if this is not completely accurate. The term happiness
was often used to indicate all that is positive and good for an individual (Wilson 1967;
Veenhoven 1984). Having this meaning, it was used as a synonym of well-being or qual-
ity of life, denoting in this case both individual and collective welfare (e.g. McCall 1975;
Simpson 1975; Shin and Johnston 1978; Griffin 2007). In the fifties, adjustment and morale
were sometimes also used with this connotation. Starting from the sixties, the term life sat-
isfaction came into use (e.g. Gurin et al. 1960; Cantril 1965; Bradburn 1969). In the early
seventies began the analysis of quality of life in a social indicators’ perspective. Social
indicators can be defined—according to Ferriss (1988)—as statistical time series “ [… ]used
to monitor the social system, helping to identify changes and to guide intervention to alter
the course of social change”. Some authors argued that since economic indicators were
introduced to guide economic policies, social indicators are required to guide social poli-
cies (e.g. Lane 1994). Landmark papers have been, in that decade, the study about life sat-
isfaction and economic growth in the U.S. during the post-war period by Easterlin (1974),
the study about welfare in Northern Europe by Allardt (1976) and the work by Witt et al.
(1980) about the measure of life satisfaction in people with different ages. Starting from
the eighties, the formalisation of a cognitive perspective in life satisfaction became more
and more important. In 1984, for the first time Diener introduced the term subjective well-
being. Subjective well-being covers a wider range of concepts than just happiness (Diener
et al. 1999). It includes good mental states, embracing all of the various evaluations, pos-
itive and negative, that people make of their lives and the affective reactions of people
to their experiences. It can be seen as being satisfied with own life while feeling good,
involving both cognitive and affective appraisals of life. This term was also considered by
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the recent guidelines for
drawing life satisfaction studies in a European context (OECD 2013). According to Linley
et al. (2009), life satisfaction—or a cognitive assessment of satisfaction with life circum-
stances—is one key indicator of subjective well-being, considering the prevalence of posi-
tive affect as well as the absence of negative affect. In recent years, quality of life was also
widely used in a Health domain (e.g. de Haes and van Knippenberg 1985; Farquhar 1995;
Anderson and Burckhardt 1999), even if some authors debated about the possible misuses
of this term in health-related studies (see Hyland 1999; Bradley 2001; Moons 2004).
The need of a journal mainly focused on the research problems related to quality of
life emerged at the beginning of seventies, following the vision that Alex C. Michalos—
founder editor of SIR and its editor-in-chief for 40 years—matured during his experiences
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Mapping the Evolution of Social Research and Data Science on…
as social researcher and scholar (Michalos 2005b). At the beginning, SIR issues were dom-
inated by North American scholars with a background in Economics, despite the original
concept of Michalos to state a clearing house opened to anyone interested in studying the
different aspects of quality of life. Over the next few years, the debate became ever and
ever international, giving to several researchers of different spheres the possibility of sub-
mitting their contributions. The journal was published by D. Reidel Publishing (Dordrecht,
NL) in 1974–1988, it was taken over by Kluwer Academic Publishing in 1988–2004 and
finally by Springer Nature from 2005 to the present. In its 45 year history, SIR published
142 volumes and 222 issues, adding more than 4700 articles.
This paper aims at reviewing—from a general perspective—the whole collection of
publications appeared on SIR in the last 30 years (1989–2018). The approach followed to
analyse this extensive corpus of publications relies upon the theoretical framework of bib-
liometric studies. Bibliometrics aims at investigating the literature of a given domain from
a quantitive point of view, taking into account leading institutions and countries, influential
authors and papers. At the same time, this approach allows uncovering the main topics
and the research directions that had a place into the journal. The work is structured as
follows. Section 2 introduces the foundations of Bibliometrics and describes the different
techniques to be used throughout the paper, briefly reviewing similar studies conducted
on a single journal. Section 3 presents the results of the analyses performed on the last
30 years of SIR, considering the social, intellectual and conceptual structure of the journal.
Section 4 discusses the main findings and limitations of the study, highlighting possible
future research directions.
2 Bibliometric Methodology and Related Work
In recent years, a growing attention has been devoted to the systematic study of the scien-
tific literature dealing with a given domain of research, thanks to the availability of online
databases together with the development of effective tools able to perform automatic analy-
ses. Once a research domain has reached a certain degree of maturity, it is common prac-
tice for its scholars to focus their attention towards the literature generated by the refer-
ence scientific community. The study of the different publications can uncover whether a
domain has an inward- or outward- looking perspective, showing the primary schools of
thought and the connections between them (Hubert 1977; van Leeuwen 2006), highlight-
ing the circulation of new ideas and trends into the community as well as the existence of
barriers.
Bibliometrics helps in depicting the history and the general state-of-the-art of a specific
research field or topic, taking into account the written production as the major formal chan-
nel of communication among scientists (Bellardo 1980). The use of a bibliometric approach
allows providing more objective and reliable analyses based on statistical techniques
(Pritchard 1969; Broadus 1987; Diodato and Gellatly 2013), having the possibility of carrying
out both basic (e.g. tabulations of the research by years) and advanced (e.g. author co-citation
and author co-authorship) analyses of the large volumes of documentation related to the field
of interest (McBurney and Novak 2002). The key procedures commonly implemented in bib-
liometric studies are the performance analysis (Peters and van Raan 1991; White and McCain
1998) and the so-called science mapping (Noyons et al. 1999; Börner et al. 2003). The first
one aims at evaluating the productivity and the popularity of the different actors on the basis
of bibliographic data. The second one tries to highlight the structural and cognitive patterns of
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M. Aria et al.
the domain, by visualising the main topics with a synchronic (Callon et al. 1983; Noyons and
van Raan 1998) or a diachronic perspective (Garfield 1994; Cobo et al. 2011).
Network tools can be used to visualise and exploring the data both in performance analysis
and science mapping, aiming at analysing the social, intellectual and conceptual structure of
the research domain (Cuccurullo et al. 2016). The social structure can be represented by using
the collaboration networks among countries, among institutions and among authors, having a
macro, meso and micro perspective on scientific cooperation (Glänzel 2002). In each network,
the relationships among the different actors are usually built on the basis of joint publications
(e.g. Luukkonen et al. 1993; Katz and Martin 1997), reflecting the degree of cooperation of
regular study groups and hidden groups of scholars. The intellectual structure can be deduced
from the co-citation networks, considering both the bibliographic coupling (Kessler 1963) and
the co-citation coupling (Small 1973) as alternative criteria for building the relationships. In
particular, these kind of networks aims at visualising the connections among sources, publica-
tions or authors, depending on the scope of the analysis (Marshakova 1981). In this way, it is
possible to estimate the impact and the influence of the different actors in the analysed field.
The conceptual structure can be highlighted by mapping the so-called research front of the
domain, thanks to the co-word networks. Each scientific field or topic can be characterised by
a set of keywords (Hubert 1980), assigned by the authors of the publications or by the citation
indexes—e.g. the KeyWord Plus coding used by Web of Science (Garfield and Sher 1993).
Starting from this set of keywords and its representation as a term co-occurrence network, it
is possible to represent the knowledge base embodied in the analysed collection (Leydesdorff
1989; He 1999) and explore the different thematics developed into the research domain (e.g.
Tijssen and van Raan 1989; van Meter et al. 2004).
Many studies focused on the bibliometric analysis of a specific journal. A journal is a pri-
mary way to spread knowledge, it speaks for authors who published and somehow it can be
considered as an indicator of the literature development of a particular research field. Nebe-
long-Bonnevie and Frandsen (2006) stated that a bibliometric analysis of a single journal
provides a detailed multi-faceted picture of the characteristics of that journal. The statistical
tools commonly used are the same as when different journals concerning a topic are analysed,
having a different perspective. The methodology is applied to the documents published by a
journal in various issues, including the publication and citation structures, the temporal evolu-
tion, authors, universities, countries and keywords. This type of analysis dates back to about
30 years ago with the work of Heck and Bremser (1986) which studied the evolution of the
Accounting Review over 60 years of existence. During the years several other studies regarding
the most diverse fields of research have been proposed (e.g. Merigó et al. 2015b; Cobo et al.
2015; Valenzuela et al. 2017; Bond et al. 2019). Some of them consider a specific reference
period, often because of a remarkable anniversary of the journal. Inkpen and Beamish (1994)
analysed the first 25 years of the Journal of International Business Studies, whereas Watts
(1998) focused on the first 25 volumes of the Journal of Accounting and Economics. Other
works are mainly focused on specific aspects, such as the citation analysis (Borokhovich et al.
2011) or the comparison between two journals (Córdoba et al. 2012).
3 Social Research and Data Science on 30 Years of SIR (1989–2018)
To collect the articles published on SIR in the past 30 years, we queried the Web of Sci-
ence (WoS) indexing database on May 24th, 2019. WoS—launched by the Institute for Sci-
entific Information (ISI) and now maintained by Clarivate Analytics—is one of the main
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databases allowing to explore the literature of several scientific domains. It includes sev-
eral citation databases specialised on specific fields (e.g. Social Science Citation Index for
Social Science), covering more than 20000 journals, conference proceedings and books.
Alternative databases can be considered to retrieve bibliometric datasets, like Scopus or
Google Scholar, and in recent years there was an intense debate concerning which source
is better (e.g. Bar-Ilan et al. 2007; Vieira and Gomes 2009; de Winter et al. 2014; Har-
zing and Alakangas 2016). Scopus, for example, considers a wider time-span than WoS
but with a higher rate of duplicated citation records, mainly caused by a certain lack of
standardisation (Valderrama-Zurián et al. 2015; van Eck and Waltman 2017). Even if not
free from faults, WoS is then commonly considered the source with the highest quality of
information.
We searched for all the documents belonging to SIR, obtaining 4094 entries. This set
covers only a part of the 4777 documents published by SIR until May 2019, since the WoS
Core Collection indexes only the SIR publications appeared after 1985. We then decided to
limit our study to the last 30 years, i.e. the period 1989–2018 (from volume 21 to volume
140). In this reference interval, SIR published 3634 citable documents (GTP), including
3417 articles, 175 proceedings papers and 42 reviews. The reason for excluding the 135
citable documents published on SIR in the period 1985–1988, lies mainly on the lack of the
corresponding keywords and abstracts in the database. This is a well-known limit, because
the keywords of the documents published before the nineties are generally not indexed (Liu
et al. 2015; Rousseau et al. 2018).
All the analyses showed in the following were carried out with the open-source R pack-
age bibliometrix (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017). Figure 1 shows the year-wise distribution of
the 3634 documents published during 1989–2018.
The journal on an average published about 121.13 documents per year. The fluctuations
in publication pattern were considered throughout the period of study. The annual growth
rate was on average 9.31%. With the change of publisher from Kluwer to Springer in 2005,
it is possible to see that the number of documents per year overcame 100. In the first dec-
ade, SIR published on average 38.5 documents per year. At the end of the nineties, the
annual volume of documents increased, with an average production equal to 79.2 docu-
ments per year. In the last decade, starting from 2009, the number of publications grew up,
reaching 245.7 documents per year. Two main factors explain this growth (Merigó et al.
2015a). Firstly, the overall number of researchers has increased exponentially, boosting
also the number of submissions to the journals. Secondly, the development of computer
technology as well as the diffusion of Internet made easier gathering information and dis-
covering more rapidly the newest trends in a research field. In Table 1, the main figures and
statistics about the analysed SIR collection are reported.
Looking at the authorship pattern, the documents were written by 6128 scholars
(GTA), with an average value of 0.59 documents per author ( ADa = GTP/GTA). The
29.5% of these documents was written by a single author, 33.2% by two authors, 21.5%
by three authors, and the remaining 15.8% by four authors or more. Preliminary con-
siderations can be made by taking into account the authors per document ratio, the co-
authors per document ratio and the collaboration index (CI). From the authors per doc-
ument ratio ( AAd = ADa−1 = GTA/GTP), it is possible to state that a document of SIR
was written on average by 1.69 authors. This ratio evaluates the extent to which scholars
publish single-authored or co-authored publications, and it can be also seen as a proxy
for the average size of research teams. However, publications with a large number of
authors can increase this metric substantially. For this reason, we can also look at the
co-authors per document ratio ( ACAd = TAapp/GTP), considering the number of times
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Fig. 1 Year-wise distribution of SIR documents in 1989–2018
Table 1 Main statistics about the

1989–2018 SIR collection Years Y 30
Documents GTP 3634
Authors GTA 6128
Citations GTC 57029
Single-authored documents TP1 1072
Multi-authored documents TPm 2562
Authors of single-authored documents TA1 808
Authors of multi-authored documents TAm 5320
Author appearances TAapp 8604
Documents per year ADy 121.13
Documents per author ADa 0.59
Authors per document AAd 1.69
Co-Authors per documents ACAd 2.37
Collaboration index CI 2.08
Citations per document ACd 15.69
h-index h 91
Authors’ keywords GTKDE 6841
Keywords plus GTKID 4223
an author appeared into the collection. In the analysed period, we observed on average
2.37 authors per documents. From both these two measures emerges hence an average
number of authors for each document almost equal to 2. The divergence in the results is
related to the different ways used to count authors. If, for example, an author has written
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three different publications, he/she will be counted only once in the authors per docu-
ment ratio but he/she will be counted three times in the co-authors per document ratio.
Because of the complex nature of interactions that take place among authors over a
period of time, the precise nature and magnitude of collaboration cannot be easily deter-
mined from these metrics. In order to overcome this problem, the collaboration index
can be considered (Subramanyam 1983; Ajiferuke et al. 1988; Kumar and Kumar 2008):
TAm
CI = (1)
TPm
where TAm is the total number of authors of multi-authored documents and the TPm is the
total number of multi-authored documents. In the 1989–2018 collection, we observed a
collaboration index of 2.08, substantially confirming the results obtained from the other
author-level metrics.
All the documents received a total of 57029 citations, leading to a ratio of approxi-
mately 16 citations per publication and an h-index (Hirsch 2005) of 91. The h-index
measures the research output with respect to its citation impact, considering the set of
most cited works and the number of citations they received. The SIR value indicates
that 91 publications received at least 91 citations each, positioning the SIR in the top
journals of Social Science.
In order to evaluate the importance of SIR, it is also possible to look at the year-wise
distribution of the impact factor (IF, Garfield 1955). The impact factor of a journal in
a year t is the ratio of the citations obtained in that year by the documents published in
t − 1 and t − 2 on the total number of documents published in t − 1 and t − 2:
TCt,t−1 + TCt,t−2
IFt = (2)
TPt,t−1 + TPt,t−2
Figure 2 graphically compares the yearly ISI impact factors (IF_WoS) in 1999–2018 with
the similar cite scores calculated by Scopus (IF_Sc) and the average values of both indices
(Avg_IF). In this case, we limited the observation of IF to the last 20 years due to the lack
of official data prior to 1999.
The differences between IF_WoS and IF_Sc for each year are caused by the different
indexation used in the two databases. The IF positive trend suggests a growing good
reputation of SIR, since year by year the average number of citations per document was
higher with respect to the previous level. In particular, SIR increased its rank in the
Social Science and Sociology WoS subject categories, overcoming the IF 25th percentile
(Q3) in 1997/1998, the IF 50th percentile (Q2) in 2004 and the IF 75th percentile (Q1)
in 2011/2012.
Considering with which journals SIR is mostly connected is another aspect to evalu-
ate journal reputation. Since SIR declares to be an interdisciplinary journal, published
documents presented a very diverse reference literature.
In Fig. 3a, the top ten journals that cite more SIR documents are shown. The Jour-
nal of Happiness Studies was the most citing source with 531 citations, followed
by PloS one and Personality and Individual Differences with 293 and 280 citations,
respectively. The first position of the Journal of Happiness Studies (IF = 2.99) relied
on the fact that this journal shares some primary topics of interest with SIR, particu-
larly focusing on subjective well-being. PloS one (IF = 2.87) guests studies from any
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M. Aria et al.
Fig. 2 Impact factor evolution of SIR in 1999–2018
discipline across science, while Personality and Individual Differences (IF = 2.38)
aims at exploring and understanding the structure of personality and individual
differences.
Looking at Fig. 3b, the most cited sources in SIR collection are displayed. The first
one was the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (IF = 6.67), mentioned
about 2741 times in SIR documents. This journal publishes papers developed in all the
areas of personality and social psychology. Social Science and Medicine(IF = 3.39)
was the second most cited source with 1568 citations, followed by the Psychological
Bulletin (IF = 17.49) with 1526 citations. Interestingly, the main sources belong to the
psychology field, with specific reference to social psychology. These results point out
the great interest of the last years in subjective well-being and all the aspects related to
personal determinants in evaluating life satisfaction.
We noted that the other major journals specifically focused on quality of life
that appeared as top citing sources—Quality of Life Research (QOLR) and Applied
Research in Quality of Life (ARQOL)—were not present in the top cited sources. Both
journals are published by Springer Nature, and younger with respect to SIR (18 and
32 years, respectively). QOLR, official journal of the International Society of Qual-
ity of Life Research, is mainly focused on heath-related quality of life. ARQOL, offi-
cial journal of the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies, is instead mainly
focused on applied researches in natural and social sciences domains. Interestingly,
some members of the ARQOL editorial board are or have been also in the SIR edito-
rial board. Analysing the two journals, we concluded that the differences in the citation
patterns (citing sources vs cited sources) can be explained with the diverse reference
domain for QOLR, and the shorter editorial history for ARQOL.
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Fig. 3 Top ten citing/cited sources of 1989–2018 SIR documents (without self-cites)
3.1 Productivity and Collaboration Networks of Countries and Institutions
As stated above, SIR became an international journal guesting contributions of researchers

coming worldwide. Several countries played a key role in publishing on SIR. In Table 2,
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M. Aria et al.
Table 2 Top ten most important countries in terms of publications and citations

SCR Country TP % SCR Country TC % AC d
1 USA 658 18.11 1 USA 11008 19.30 16.73

2 Canada 301 8.28 2 China 5143 9.02 17.85
3 China 288 7.93 3 Canada 4049 7.10 13.45
4 Italy 218 6.00 4 Italy 3973 6.97 18.22
5 Spain 215 5.92 5 Australia 3236 5.67 15.70
6 Australia 206 5.67 6 United Kingdom 2991 5.24 16.43
7 United Kingdom 182 5.01 7 Spain 2806 4.92 13.05
8 Netherlands 178 4.90 8 Netherlands 2128 3.73 11.96
9 Taiwan 105 2.89 9 Taiwan 1422 2.49 13.54
10 Germany 101 2.78 10 Germany 1180 2.07 11.68
SCR = ranking, TP = publications, TC = citations, AC d = average citations per document
the ten most active countries are listed and sorted considering both publications and cita-
tions, using the standard competition ranking (SCR)1. It is necessary to notice that with
country we referred to the author’s affiliation country was at the time of publication. More-
over, only the countries of the corresponding author were considered in the following.
USA was the leading country both in terms of total number of publications (TP) and
total number of citations (TC). If we consider the number of published documents, USA
were followed in the analysed period by Canada and China for the publications, but on
the opposite by China and Canada for the citations. However, these performances may be
related to their large populations. Indeed, per capita, a number of European countries pub-
lished more. In particular, the most productive and influential country in Europe was Italy,
both in terms of TP and TC. It is interesting to note that Italy also reported the highest
average citations per document ( ACd ) in the analysed period, reaching a value of about
18 citations. This primary position in the SIR rankings is reflected also by a growing and
noticeable presence of Italian scholars in the SIR editorial board, in which F. Maggino
inherited the legacy of A.C. Michalos filling—from 2015—the role of editor-in-chief
(Maggino 2014).
To see the evolution of the leading countries in SIR during the years, a deeper insight on
the three different decades included in 1989–2018 can be useful. Tables 3 and and 4 show
the relative weights of each of top country for TP and TC over the three different decades.
The TP rose by 105.71% in the 2000s—with respect to the previous decade—and
then by the 210.23% in the 2010s. USA was always the main leader of the journal, but its
importance dropped from 32.99% in the first decade to 13.15% in the third decade. Even
more Canada registered a negative trend, losing six positions in the ranking of productiv-
ity. China started publishing regularly on SIR in the 2000s (the first document is dated
1998), significantly increasing its weight in terms of published documents. In particular,
the growth of China can be explained with its the ever-increasing importance in the global
economy, reflected also in its current prominent position in many research fields (Jonkers
1
In an SCR scheme, entities with an equal value receive the same rank, then a gap equal to the number of
entities ranked above is left in the ranking order.
13
Table 3 Relative weights of the top most productive countries per decade in 1989–2018
Country Decade Overall time
1989–1998 1999–2008 2009–2018
USA 32.99% 26.26% 13.15% 18.11%

Canada 23.12% 12.75% 4.52% 8.28%
China 0.26% 4.17% 10.34% 7.93%
Italy 2.08% 2.65% 7.69% 6.00%
Spain 0.78% 3.28% 7.57% 5.92%
Australia 4.68% 6.31% 5.62% 5.67%
United Kingdom 1.56% 4.29% 5.78% 5.01%
Netherlands 5.45% 5.30% 4.68% 4.90%
Taiwan 0.26% 2.78% 3.34% 2.89%
Germany 1.56% 2.78% 2.97% 2.78%
TP 385 792 2457 3634
Table 4 Relative weights of the top most influential countries per decade in 1989–2018
Country Decade Overall time
1989–1998 1999–2008 2009–2018
USA 18.11% 19.71% 19.42% 19.30%

China 10.43% 10.09% 7.21% 9.02%
Canada 5.36% 2.80% 12.53% 7.10%
Italy 8.19% 8.89% 4.33% 6.97%
Australia 1.82% 6.81% 6.28% 5.67%
United Kingdom 7.67% 3.31% 6.18% 5.24%
Spain 5.32% 5.26% 4.37% 4.92%
Netherlands 0.53% 3.61% 5.38% 3.73%
Taiwan 3.20% 1.94% 2.75% 2.49%
Germany 2.43% 1.07% 2.97% 2.07%
TC 10589 24040 22400 57029
and Tijssen 2008; CASISD 2018). Among European countries, Italy and Spain experi-
enced very positive trends, particularly in the 2010s.
The success of the journal was also testified by the increasing number of TC through
the decades, with a growth rate of about 127% from 1990s to 2000s. In 2010s we
observed a reduction in citations of − 6.82 %, but we have to take into account the cita-
tion evolution over time. Considering equal to 85.40% the percentage of published doc-
uments that received at least one citation, we observed that each document had to wait
on average 1.89 years before receiving the the first citation (with a standard deviation
of 2.31 years). These values suggest that a more accurate evaluation of the 2009–2018
citation pattern would requires a wider observation window. Focusing on the single
countries, we observed that the influence of USA was almost constant over the dec-
ades, whereas Canada considerably increased its importance in the 2010s (from 2.80 to
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M. Aria et al.
Table 5 Intra- and inter-country Country TP SCP MCP CCR

collaboration among the top ten
productive countries
USA 658 459 199 30.20
Canada 301 210 91 30.20
China 288 212 76 26.40
Italy 218 178 40 18.30
Spain 215 175 40 18.60
Australia 206 150 56 27.20
United Kingdom 182 121 61 33.50
Netherlands 178 124 54 30.30
Taiwan 105 87 18 17.10
Germany 101 78 23 22.80
SCP = single country, MCP = multiple countries, CCR = country col-

laboration rate
12.53%). China and Italy seemed to reduce their weights in the last years but, as stated
above, the values have to be carefully considered due to a lower influence of the most
recent publications.
It is important to underline that scholars do not work in isolation, since they are
members of a worldwide community of researchers working together to provide new
insights and inspiration for new researchers to work on the same or related fields. Inter-
national co-authored publications are frequently used as a measure to obtain a com-
prehensive picture of international collaborative works. Co-authorship is a final result
of different scientific exchanges that facilitate the acquisition of science undertaken
within a community of facts and ideas. Table 5 allows verifying the propensity of each
country to collaborate with others. In particular, it provides a detail on the international
collaboration by considering the number of documents produced by authors from the
same country as metric for the intra-country collaboration (single country publications,
SCP) and the number of documents produced by authors from different countries as
metric for the inter-country collaboration (multiple countries publications, MCP). We
observed that all the leading countries showed a higher SCP, with respect to the corre-
sponding MCP, revealing that there were a lower propensity in collaborating with other
countries. By considering the Country Collaboration Rate (CCR), calculated as the
ratio between MCP and TP, it is possible to conclude that Uk was the most collabora-
tive country (33.50% CCR—61 MCP out of 182 TP), followed by Netherlands (30.30%
CCR—54 MCP out of 178 TP), USA (30.20% CCR—199 MCP out of 658 TP) and
Canada (30.20% CCR—91 MCP out of 301 TP).
A wider overview of collaboration among countries is showed in Fig. 4. The network
was drawn from the country × country adjacency matrix counting the co-authored pub-
lications. Single country publications, counted on the main diagonal of the adjacency
matrix, were omitted in the graphical representation. To highlight better the intra-coun-
try collaboration level, we considered only the first 20 countries, with a threshold of at
least 2 co-authored publications. We highlighted the total number of papers related to
each country proportionally sizing the corresponding label. Moreover, to discover group
of countries with a similar collaboration pattern, a community detection was performed
by using the multilevel approach proposed by Blondel et al. (2008). The algorithm is
based on the maximisation of a modularity score Q (Newman 2003):
13
Fig. 4 Country collaboration network
[ ]
1 ∑ 𝛿𝛿�
Q= aii� − i i si si� (3)
2h ii� 2h
where 𝛿i is the degree of the node i, h is the total number of edges in the network, and si is
the membership of the node i to a community. The rationale of this score is to consider the
quality of assigning a node to a community, by evaluating how much more densely con-
nected the nodes within a community are than how connected they would be in a random
network. Modularity ranges in an interval [0; 1], where 0 indicates a random structure and
1 indicates a strong structure. However, it has been empirically saw that modularity usu-
ally falls in a subinterval [0.3; 0.7] (Newman and Girvan 2004). The multilevel algorithm
iteratively performs two steps. The first step is a greedy assignment of nodes to the com-
munities, favoring local optimisations of modularity. The second step is the definition of a
new coarse-grained network, based on the communities found in the first step. These two
steps are repeated until no further modularity-increasing reassignments of communities are
possible.
Three communities of countries emerged. USA showed the highest between central-
ity (29.80), due to its prominent position in SIR rankings, followed by Uk (9.17) and
Netherlands (2.99). US authors particularly collaborated with Chinese, South-Korean
and Canadian researchers, respectively. In this community, there is also a link of USA
with Turkey and Israel, and a link of China with Australia and Taiwan, due to economi-
cal and geopolitical connections among these countries. On the other side, we observed
a community strictly connected to Europe, with a central position of Uk and the pres-
ence of an extra-EU country, South Africa, linked to Uk for historical reasons. The third
community, connecting India, Switzerland and France, has the peculiarity of consider-
ing three countries with a lower influence in the SIR community. The latter in particu-
lar, traditionally prefers French as primary language of communication in the Social
Science domain.
An in-depth analysis focused on institutions offers other interesting cues on the his-
tory and the evolution of SIR in the last 30 years. Table 6 shows the top ten most pro-
ductive institutions. As above, we referred to the institution each author was affiliated at
13
M. Aria et al.
Table 6 Top ten most important institutions in terms of publications and citations

SCR Institutions TP % SCR Institutions TC % AC d
1 Univ. of North. Brit. 41 1.13 1 Univ. of Illinois 4320 7.58 130.91

Columbia
2 Univ. of Melbourne 40 1.10 2 Erasmus Univ. 2018 3.54 53.11
3 Erasmus Univ. 38 1.05 3 Deakin Univ. 1825 3.20 79.35
4 Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong 37 1.02 4 Univ. of Melbourne 1298 2.28 32.45
5 Univ. of British Columbia 35 0.96 5 Univ. of California Riverside 1250 2.19 416.67
6 Univ. of Illinois 33 0.91 6 Univ. of South Carolina 1186 2.08 65.89
7 City Univ. of Hong Kong 30 0.83 7 Univ. of British Columbia 908 1.59 22.15
8 Tilburg Univ. 26 0.72 8 Univ. of North. Brit. 717 1.26 17.49
Columbia
9 Monash Univ. 23 0.63 9 VirginiaTech 694 1.22 53.38
9 Deakin Univ. 23 0.63 10 Univ. of California Davis 632 1.11 63.20
SCR = ranking, TP = publications,TC = citations,AC d = average citations per document
the time of publication. Results are expressed in terms of SCR, taking into account the
total number of publications.
Although USA was the most productive country, there was only a US university in
the top ten most productive institutions—the University of Illinois—and it is positioned
in the middle of the ranking. It is interesting to note that instead the most productive
universities in SIR—the University of Northern British Columbia, the University of
Melbourne and the Erasmus University—were from Canada, Australia and Netherlands,
respectively. If we consider the citations, the ranking provided a quite different perspec-
tive. University of Illinois was the most influential, considering the TC in 1989-2018,
followed by Erasmus University and the Australian Deakin University. The higher ACd
was scored by the University of California Riverside, equal to about 416 citations per
document. This result is incredibly high-performing, since only 3 documents were pro-
duced by the US university in the analysed period. In Fig. 5, it is possible to see the col-
laboration network among the leading institutions.
The network was drawn from the institution × institution adjacency matrix counting
the co-authored publications. We considered only the first 15 institutions, with a thresh-
old of at least 2 co-authored publications. We highlighted the total number of papers
related to each institution proportionally sizing the corresponding label. Moreover, aim-
ing at identifying groups of institutions with similar patterns, a community detection
was performed by considering the same multilevel approach used above.
We noted seven different communities. Firstly, we observed a community formed
by University of Northern British Columbia and University of British Columbia—both
from Canada—strictly connected each other. A similar situation was observed for two
universities from Netherlands, University of Utrecht and Erasmus University. There was
a strong connection between the University of Melbourne and others Australian uni-
versities, University of Western Australia and Deakin University – as well as the Til-
burg University in Netherlands. Another community was represented by a clique link-
ing the different Chinese universities located in Hong Kong, weekly connected with
the Australian universities. Finally, we observed three singleton communities, repre-
sented by the University of Oxford, the University of Illinois and the Monash University
13
Fig. 5 Institution collaboration network
Table 7 Top ten most influent authors in terms of publications and citations

SCR Authors TP FTP SCR Authors TC AC d
1 Michalos A.C. 41 20.3 1 Diener E. 4613 200.57

2 Huebner E.S. 31 11.5 2 Cummins R.A. 2320 110.48
3 Veenhoven R. 27 18.5 3 Veenhoven R. 2099 77.74
3 Zumbo B.D. 27 9.82 4 Huebner E.S. 1670 53.87
5 Headey B. 26 14.5 5 Biswas Diener R. 1376 196.57
6 Diener E. 23 9.7 6 Lyubomirsky S. 1280 426.67
6 Shek D.T.L. 23 13.0 7 Michalos A.C. 1167 28.46
6 Sirgy M.J. 23 8.0 8 Lepper H.S. 1161 580.50
9 Moller V. 22 13.9 9 Sirgy M.J. 1136 49.39
10 Cummins R.A. 21 10.9 10 Headey B. 889 34.19
SCR = ranking, TP = publications, FTP = fractionalised publications, TC = citations, AC d = average cita-

tions per document
in Australia. The highlighted links can be clearly explained by analysing the different
authors belonging to these institutions.
3.2 Highly Contributive Authors, Papers and Citations
As above, in Table 7 the ten most influent authors in SIR are listed, sorted both in terms of
total number of publications and citations.
In general, it is possible to observe that all the top authors wrote at least twenty arti-
cles in SIR during the analysed period. The most productive author was Michalos with 41
publications, followed by Huebner with 31 publications and Veenhoven with 27 publica-
tions. Some of the leading authors had a preminent position in the journal from an editorial
13
M. Aria et al.
perspective, since Michalos was the founding editor of the journal and all the others were
members of the editorial board of the journal. We noted that, among the top cited authors,
also Biswas Diener, Lyubomirsky and Lepper joined the board of SIR when Michalos left.
In order to identify the most productive authors on the basis of their actual contribution, the
fractionalised frequency of publications (FTP) has also been reported. Fractional count-
ing considers the number of publications with respect to the number of authors, removing
evident disproportions in authors’ contributions in single- or multi-authored publications
and hence providing an adjusted number of publications per author (Batista et al. 2006;
Vavryčuk 2018). If we consider FTP, the first author was again Michalos with a value of
20.3, followed in this case by Veenhoven (18.5) and Headey (14.5). Looking at the total
citations, the ranking of the authors was quite different. The most important author in SIR
was Diener, whose publications received 4613 citations. This latter result was also con-
firmed looking at the ten most cited SIR’s publications in Table 8. About a half of the most
cited publications were written by Diener, alone or together with other authors. All the
documents dealt with subjective well-being. In particular, his most cited paper (789 cita-
tions) was a review on the new trends for measuring subjective well-being (Diener 1994),
with 31.6 average citations per year ( ACy).
Cummins was the second most influential author with 2320 total citations and 110.48
citations per year. His publications (Cummins 1996; Cummins et al. 2003) were the eighth
and ninth of SIR’s most cited papers, with 399 and 387 citations, respectively. In Cum-
mins (1996), the author tried to group 173 domain names for life satisfaction under 7 head-
ings (material well-being, health, productivity, intimacy, safety, community and emotional
well-being). Veenhoven confirmed the third position in the ranking also in terms of total
citations (2099) with about 77.74 citations per year. His most cited SIR’s publication is a
single-authored paper (Veenhoven 1991) that received 446 total citations and 15.9 citations
per year. In this article, he tried to disprove the widely shared theory that happiness is rela-
tive, claiming it depends on need-gratification. The most cited paper in SIR was written
by Lyubomirsky and Lepper (1999), receiving 1103 citations and the highest average cita-
tions per year (55.1). Particularly noteworthily, these authors were not particularly present
on SIR, publishing only 3 and 2 documents, respectively. This work was very influential
because it proposed a new measure of subjective happiness, evaluating its reliability and
validity through an extensive empirical study.
It is interesting to compare the results reported in Table 8 with the ones obtained by
Michalos on different time intervals, considering the 1974–2003 SIR collection (2005a)
and the 1974–2014 SIR collection (2017). In the 2005 study, covering the first 30 years of
the journal, only the papers of Diener (1994) and Veenhoven (1991) were present, with a
rank of 2 and 8, respectively. The other papers listed in the top ten most cited publications
were published before 1985, then excluded in our analysis. In the 2017 study, covering
instead the first 40 years of SIR, the ranking was more similar to the one we found, con-
firming the 1994 paper of Diener as a milestone in quality of life studies. It is also remark-
able than another paper published by Diener et al. in 2010, ranked as fifth by number of
citations in our analysis, was not present in the 1974–2014 top ten most cited publications.
The authors were also analysed according to their propensity in collaborating with
each other. Scientific collaboration is a distinctive characteristic of contemporary research
since more and more scholars act as members of teams rather than as single players (Katz
1997; Glänzel and Schubert 2005). Co-authorship networks allow assessing collaboration
patterns and identifying the social structure as well as the leading scholars of a scientific
domain, providing a great insight into the dynamics of knowledge creation. The collabora-
tion network of SIR was drawn from the author × author adjacency matrix counting the
13
Table 8 Top ten most cited publications
SCR Author/s–Year Title DT TC ACy
1 Lyubomirsky and Lepper (1999) A measure of subjective happiness: preliminary reliability and construct validation A 1103 55.1
2 Diener (1994) Assessing subjective well-being—progress and opportunities R 789 31.6
3 Diener and Suh (1997) Measuring quality of life: economic, social, and subjective indicators A 670 30.5
4 Diener and Biswas Diener (2002) Will money increase subjective well-being? R 561 33.0
5 Diener et al. (2010) New well-being measures: short scales to assess flourishing and positive and negative feelings A 496 55.1
6 Veenhoven (1991) Is happiness relative? A 446 15.9
7 Diener et al. (1993) The relationship between income and subjective well-being—relative or absolute? A 402 15.5
8 Cummins (1996) The domains of life satisfaction: an attempt to order chaos A 399 17.3
9 Cummins et al. (2003) Developing a national index of subjective well-being: the australian unity well-being index A 387 24.2
10 Boyce et al. (2006) The family affluence scale as a measure of national wealth: validation of an adolescent self-report meas- A 332 25.5
ure
SCR = ranking, DT = document type, TC = citations, AC y = average citations per year
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M. Aria et al.
Fig. 6 Author collaboration network
co-authored publications. As above, we performed a community detection by using the

multilevel algorithm to discover group of connected authors. In Fig. 6, the 1989–2018 SIR
co-authorship network is showed. We considered only the first 20 authors and a thresh-
old of at least 2 co-authored publications, only representing the strongest connections and
avoiding mere one-off collaborations. The edge between two authors represents the exist-
ence of a collaboration, with a different thickness according to the collaboration strength.
Moreover, we highlighted the total number of papers published by a single author propor-
tionally sizing the corresponding label.
We depicted 7 distinct communities of authors. The largest group included 5 authors:
Sirgy (as leading author), together with Lee, Johar, Webb, and Ekici. Sirgy, the sixth most
productive author on SIR, has dealt in particular of life satisfaction in a business studies
domain. He wrote about a half of his publications on SIR with Lee (12 on 23 total publica-
tions), intensively collaborating both during Lee’s stay as PhD student at Virginia Tech and
after when he moved to South Korea. The collaboration with Johar, Webb and Ekici (which
also studied at Virginia Tech) took mainly place in the framework of the studies concern-
ing materialism and life satisfaction. The research group including Casas, Gonzalez and
Figuer—all members of the University of Girona in Spain—was particularly active in the
field of adolescents’ well-being, publishing together 5 articles on SIR. Another relevant
group included Michalos (first most productive author on SIR), Zumbo (third most produc-
tive author on SIR) and Ferriss. These three authors are also paired because of their partici-
pation in the editorial board of SIR. We observed a stronger connection between Michalos
and Zumbo (9 on 41 TP)—both working in the Canadian province of British Columbia—
than between Michalos and Ferriss (2 on 41 TP). Some other communities were made
up of only two authors. Headey (fifth most productive author on SIR) and Muffels wrote
together 10 articles, focusing on happiness and welfare from a socio-economic viewpoint.
Wu and Yao, from the Taiwan University, wrote 9 articles for SIR exploring the use of the
World Health Organization Quality of Life scale (WHO 1997) in different contexts. Stones
and Kozma, from the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, wrote 10 articles
13
focusing on happiness modeling from a quantitative viewpoint. Kitchen and Williams,

from the McMaster University in Canada, wrote 11 studies concerning different determi-
nants of quality of life in the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Ontario. Finally, we
found 5 singleton, represented by Huebner (second most productive author), Veenhoven
(third most productive author), Diener (sixth most productive author), Shek (sixth most
productive author), and Cummins (tenth most productive author). This result suggests that
these authors published often with different other authors, or at least they did not collabo-
rate with a stable research group for the articles published on SIR.
3.3 Thematic Analysis and Evolution
In this section, we focused our attention on the conceptual structure of SIR’s publications.
As we said, this type of analysis helps to understand the topics covered by the journal
and to define which are the most important and the most recent ones. Identifying the con-
ceptual structure could also be useful for studying the research topic evolution over time
(Dumont Oliveira 2018).
The basic idea is that terms which appear together in a document—e.g. keywords, terms
extracted from titles or abstracts—can be represented as a term co-occurrence network. We
then started from a co-occurrence matrix in which each cell outside the principal diagonal
contains the similarity of two terms expressed as equivalence (Callon et al. 1991):
n2ij
eqvij = (4)
ni × nj
with nij as number of publications in which two terms i and j co-occur, ni and nj number of
publications in which each one appears. This measure assumes values in the interval [0;1]
and evaluates how much two terms are associated. The co-occurrence matrices can be seen
as adjacency matrices and graphically visualised as undirected weighted networks. On each
subperiod co-occurrence matrix, we performed a community detection based on the simple
centre algorithm (Coulter et al. 1998). This analysis allows finding subgroups of strongly
linked terms, where each subgroup corresponds to a centre of interest or to a given research
theme/topic of the analysed collection. Once the analysis is carried on, it is possible to plot
the results in a so called strategic or thematic diagram (Cobo et al. 2011), according to the
Callon centrality ct and Callon density dt of each each cluster/theme t:
∑ ∑ eqvit jt
ct = 10 × eqvit ht� dt = 100 × (5)
kt
with terms it and ht′ belonging to different topics, terms it and jt belonging to the same
topic, kt total number of terms of a topic. Callon centrality can be read as the importance of
the topic in the whole collection, while Callon density can be read as a measure of the top-
ic’s development. The graphical representation allows defining four typologies of themes
(Cahlik 2000), depending on the quadrant in which they are plotted:
• Themes in the upper-right quadrant are known as the motor themes, characterised by
high centrality and high density, meaning that they are developed and important for the
research field;
• Themes in the lower-right quadrant are known as basic and transversal themes, charac-
terised by high centrality and low density, meaning that these themes are important for
13
M. Aria et al.
Table 9 Main information about Decade TP % DE AK d

the three analysed sub-periods
1989–1998 385 10.59 157 0.40
1999–2008 792 21.79 1470 1.86
2009–2018 2457 67.61 5906 2.40
TP = publications, DE = authors’ keywords, AK d = average key-

words per document
a domain and they concern general topics transversal to the different research areas of
the field;
• Themes in the lower-left quadrant are known as emerging or declining themes, with
low centrality and low density, meaning that are weakly developed and marginal;
• Themes in the upper-left quadrant are known as the high developed and isolated
themes, with well developed internal links (high density) but unimportant external links
(low centrality), meaning that they are of limited importance for the field.
To highlight the main research themes developed on SIR and evaluating their evolution
over time, we decided to divide our temporal interval (1989–2018) into three sub-periods
of 10 years. In each temporal interval, we considered the keywords used in the different
documents by the authors (DE). Table 9 shows the main information about the sub-periods.
The number of publications rose substantially in the reference time, observing that
about two-thirds of the analysed documents were published in the 2009–2018 decade. The
keywords used in this decade were more than 37 times those in the first one. This value was
determined by the different number of publications, but also because of the indexation pro-
cess implemented in WoS. The keywords of many documents published before 2000s are
indeed not included in the database. Finally, it is essential to specify that the total number
of keywords (6841) was minor than the sum of keywords used in each sub-period, since
several keywords appeared in more than one decade.
For each sub-period, a normalisation of the keywords was considered in order to avoid
trivial duplications. Moreover, a minimum threshold of 3 occurrences was imposed to filter
only the most frequent keywords. In each keyword co-occurrence matrix, the cells outside
the principal diagonal contain the similarity of a couple of keywords in terms of asso-
ciation strength (Coulter et al. 1998). This measure assumes values in the interval [0;1]
and evaluates how much two keywords are associated. On each sub-period co-occurrence
matrix, a community detection procedure was performed by using the multilevel algorithm.
In the following, the thematic maps referred to each 10-years sub-period are showed, plot-
ting the community with at least 3 keywords. Each theme is labelled with the correspond-
ing most frequent keywords. The readability of the representations is enhanced by pro-
portionally dimension each topic/theme with the total occurrences of the keywords that
compose it.
In the first sub-period (Fig. 7), four main topics emerged. We observed a different use
of the terms related to quality of life to describe the research domain. According to the
strategic diagram, social indicators/poverty was the motor theme of SIR, since the journal
was specifically founded for having a clearing house in which develop the debate concern-
ing this topic at the dawn of the Social Indicators movement (Land and Michalos 2018). In
the lower-right quadrant, quality of life appeared as a general theme and included also the
13
Fig. 7 Strategic diagram of the 1989–1998 sub-period
different applicative domains of the topic. On the left, happiness appeared as a declining
theme—with low density and low centrality—since from the sixties the term life satisfac-
tion started to be more used in the field of quality of life studies. This latter claim is con-
firmed by the presence of life satisfaction in the upper-left quadrant as a niche theme of the
period, with high density but low centrality.
In the second sub-period (Fig. 8), SIR issues pivoted on a greater number of topics. In
particular, the journal published a greater number of studies focused on empirical studies.
We observed that mental health and its related aspects were an important motor theme of
this decade. Quality of life consolidated its role as basic theme—with a higher central-
ity with respect to the previous sub-period—but specifically linked with health aspects,
whereas life satisfaction/subjective well-being appeared as general and transversal themes.
Other basic theme of this period were the evaluation and measurement of social capi-
tal and development. Studies focused on education/gender/migration emerged as mar-
ginal theme together with china/democracy. The development of this latter topic can be
explained—as seen above in Sect. 3.1—with the increasing presence of Chinese authors
in this decade with respect to the previous one. Socioeconomic status, multilevel analysis
and welfare appeared in the last quadrant as very specialised themes of the period. Interest-
ingly, poverty/children started to shift from a peripheral to a more central position in the
journal, having a high density and a medium centrality level.
In the third sub-period (Fig. 9), we observed a different topic distribution. Health/educa-
tion/income and gender/job satisfaction/time use were the motor themes of the most recent
decade. Poverty/inequality was a novel basic theme, together with quality of life and life
satisfaction/subjective well-being/happiness that consolidated their position as transversal
themes. Social capital shifted in the lower-left quadrant becoming a marginal theme, with
a lower centrality with respect to the previous decade. In the same quadrant appeared also
multidimensional poverty/wellbeing, representing a novel approach to define poverty as a
multidimensional picture . This theme, linked with social indicators/human development
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M. Aria et al.
in the upper-left quadrant, started to be more discussed thanks to the raising popularity
of the indices used by the United Nations Development Programme (Alkire and Foster
2009; UNDP 2010). Democracy became a more specialised theme with respect to the pre-
vious decade, focusing on the whole Asia rather than on China. It is interesting to note
that another peripheral but high developed theme was measurement/validity/confirmatory
13
Fig. 10 Thematic evolution on SIR through the sub-periods
analysis, indicating a greater interest in the theoretical aspects concerning the quantitative
evaluation of quality of life.
After analysing each sub-period separetely, it is possible to trace the temporal evolu-
tion of the research themes on SIR. In Fig. 10, a so-called sankey diagram is used to show
how the different themes were connected and developed through the decades. The different
themes were weighted by using a modified version of the inclusion index (Rip and Cour-
tial 1984), taking into account the occurrences per decade of each keyword appearing in a
theme.
SIR’s issues were originally dominated by researchers interested in objective indicators,
whereas in recent years the attention is more focused on subjective indicators. According
to Michalos (2004), the studies characterised by the use of the term happiness are the old-
est attempts of evaluating an overall good quality of life. Several authors showed that hap-
piness and life satisfaction share some common meaning (e.g. Michalos 1991; Cummins
1998). However, because measures of happiness and life satisfaction do not have identical
connotations or denotations, it is worthwhile to analyse their components and correlates
separately. Similarly, the term quality of life was used in a more general context in the past
and often linked to health-related studies in recent years. In the first decade, happiness, life
satisfaction and quality of life appeared separately, but from the diagram it is possible to
see a wide convergence towards life satisfaction in the second decade and towards subjec-
tive well-being in the third one. Nevertheless, life satisfaction can be considered as not
only one dimension of the broader construct of subjective well-being (Diener 2009). Social
indicators partially evolved through the decades, focusing as a primary sphere on the stud-
ies concerning poverty. Starting from the 2000s, some new topics started to be explored
on SIR. Social capital—defined as a network of relations and supporting structures (Ram
2010)—started to become an important component in many life satisfaction studies, having
a positive effect on individuals’ wellness. Another important research path developed in
this period was the use of multilevel models, considering for example the impact of struc-
tural and functional aspects on social relations and well-being (e.g. Kafetsios 2006). In the
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M. Aria et al.
third decade, we observed a specialisation of the topics introduced in the previous decades
more than the introduction of new lines. The studies on poverty, for example, focused on
the definition of a multidimensional poverty and on vulnerability to poverty. From a meth-
odological viewpoint, the use of novel statistical techniques and the definition of new strat-
egies of analysis were particularly stressed together with empirical studies and theoretical
discussions on the determinants of quality of life.
4 Conclusions
Quality of life is a research domain that underwent various cycles of growing and declin-
ing attention and popularity, but it still offers open questions and challenges to the sci-
entific community interested in social research. This paper aimed at presenting a system-
atic review of the documents published on SIR in the last 30 years through a bibliometric
approach, tracing the evolution of the journal as well as of the research lines and trends in
the quality of life domain.
When SIR was founded in the seventies, the concept of quality of life was an alternative
to the more and more questionable concept of material prosperity, and it was considered
the new, multidimensional and much more complex goal of societal development (Noll
2002). For the first time in some of the most developed Western countries doubts were
raised about economic growth as a major goal of social progress. During the last three dec-
ades social indicators research has succeeded to considerably improve the measurement of
peoples’ quality of life as well as the monitoring of general social conditions and change.
We observed that USA and Canada led the debate on SIR in the first two analysed dec-
ades, whereas in the last years the weight of these countries declined. The relative pro-
ductivity of Canada dropped by 18.50% from 1989–1998 to 2009–2018, even though the
total number of documents published on SIR in the two periods was roughly equal. On the
contrary, China started to be an important actor of the journal, increasing its absolute and
relative importance in terms of published documents. Similarly—but with different rates
of growth – European countries became more and more top contributors of SIR. Neverthe-
less, looking at the impact of the production in terms of citations, USA and Canada con-
firmed their primary position. The latter country rose of about 7 percentage points its rela-
tive importance, with a total number of citations in the last decade 5 times greater than the
first one. Apparently, China lost importance in recent years and received less citations in
the same period. However, the influence of the documents published in 2009–2018 on lit-
erature may be correctly evaluated in the future, especially for the documents published in
the very recent issues. Looking at the international collaboration, we noted an opposition
between European countries—and those country traditionally related to Europe for histori-
cal and political reasons (e.g. South Africa)—and USA—and those country traditionally
related to USA (e.g. China, Israel). This division showed that also SIR suffered for the geo-
graphical and cultural distances that still affect scientific research in several fields (Morgan
2004; Rodríguez-Pose and Crescenzi 2008). Differing dynamics were observed for institu-
tions’ productivity, influence and collaboration. At this level, we noted that US universities
were not more productive than others, but the influence of the documents they produced—
in terms of citations—overwhelmed the other institutions. The collaboration network
among institutions showed that there was mainly a connection between universities of the
same country, distinguishing clearly three main communities (China, Canada, Australia)
and a marginal one (Netherlands). Obviously, countries and institutions are linked to the
13
scholars that authored the documents. The community of Chinese universities, located in
the Hong Kong area, reflected a groups of authors linked to D.T.L. Shek, one of the pio-
neers in Chinese quality of life research. The community of Australian universities (plus
the Tilburg University in Netherlands) emerged for the presence of R.A. Cummins and B.
Headey in the Melbourne area. Finally, the Canadian community related to the universities
in the British Columbia province was expression of the activity of A.C. Michalos and B.D.
Zumbo. The thematic analyses on each sub-period and the resulting overview through the
decades in terms of evolution, showed that the quality of life domain and consequently the
journal was originally dominated by researchers interested in objective indicators and even
if in the last years all researchers agree that objective and subjective indicators are equally
important, the near total dominance of subjective indicators research emerged in the analy-
sis (Michalos 2005a).
This study has some limitations, mainly related to the bibliometric approach itself. First
of all, the present overview was limited to the last 30 years. To depict the whole history of
SIR from the early days to the present days and trace the evolution of quality of life stud-
ies on this journal, it would be necessary to consider also the oldest issues. This lack of
information was partially induced by the use of WoS for retrieving SIR documents, since
articles published before 1985 are not publicly available. Due to this problem, we missed
some useful information about the analysed collection. However, as stated above, each of
the most common database has strengths and weakness (Falagas et al. 2008). A possible
solution to cope this limit is using at the same time more sources, comparing the different
records and imputing the missing ones. Another limit is that in thematic analysis we con-
sidered only authors’ keywords, loosing part of the interesting information contained in the
title and the abstract of each document. A deeper analysis on the other textual information
could be considered to enrich our findings on SIR. While considering these limitations, the
data presented in this study provided significant insights into the editorial activity of the
journal and the evolution of the topics discussed throughout the years.
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Social Indicators Research

Mapping the Evolution of Social Research and Data Science

Massimo Aria1 · Michelangelo Misuraca2 · Maria Spano1

Accepted: 26 January 2020

Keywords Quality of life · Bibliometric analysis · Thematic analysis

In this framework, SIR tends to favour an interdisciplinary viewpoint to the study of

2 Bibliometric Methodology and Related Work

3 Social Research and Data Science on 30 Years of SIR (1989–2018)

Fig. 1 Year-wise distribution of SIR documents in 1989–2018

Table 1 Main statistics about the

Fig. 2 Impact factor evolution of SIR in 1999–2018

Fig. 3 Top ten citing/cited sources of 1989–2018 SIR documents (without self-cites)

3.1 Productivity and Collaboration Networks of Countries and Institutions

As stated above, SIR became an international journal guesting contributions of researchers

Table 2 Top ten most important countries in terms of publications and citations

1 USA 658 18.11 1 USA 11008 19.30 16.73

SCR = ranking, TP = publications, TC = citations, AC d = average citations per document

USA 32.99% 26.26% 13.15% 18.11%

USA 18.11% 19.71% 19.42% 19.30%

Table 5 Intra- and inter-country Country TP SCP MCP CCR​

SCP = single country, MCP = multiple countries, CCR = country col-

Fig. 4 Country collaboration network

Table 6 Top ten most important institutions in terms of publications and citations

1 Univ. of North. Brit. 41 1.13 1 Univ. of Illinois 4320 7.58 130.91

SCR = ranking, TP = publications,TC = citations,AC d = average citations per document

Fig. 5 Institution collaboration network

Table 7 Top ten most influent authors in terms of publications and citations

1 Michalos A.C. 41 20.3 1 Diener E. 4613 200.57

SCR = ranking, TP = publications, FTP = fractionalised publications, TC = citations, AC d = average cita-

3.2 Highly Contributive Authors, Papers and Citations

SCR = ranking, DT = document type, TC = citations, AC y = average citations per year

Fig. 6 Author collaboration network

co-authored publications. As above, we performed a community detection by using the

focusing on happiness modeling from a quantitative viewpoint. Kitchen and Williams,

3.3 Thematic Analysis and Evolution

Table 9 Main information about Decade TP % DE AK d

TP = publications, DE = authors’ keywords, AK d = average key-

Fig. 7 Strategic diagram of the 1989–1998 sub-period

Fig. 8 Strategic diagram of the 1999–2008 sub-period

Fig. 9 Strategic diagram of the 2009–2018 sub-period

Fig. 10 Thematic evolution on SIR through the sub-periods

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2 Bibliometric Methodology and Related Work

3 Social Research and Data Science on 30 Years of SIR (1989–2018)

Fig. 1 Year-wise distribution of SIR documents in 1989–2018

Table 1 Main statistics about the

Fig. 2 Impact factor evolution of SIR in 1999–2018

Fig. 3 Top ten citing/cited sources of 1989–2018 SIR documents (without self-cites)

3.1 Productivity and Collaboration Networks of Countries and Institutions

Table 2 Top ten most important countries in terms of publications and citations

Table 5 Intra- and inter-country Country TP SCP MCP CCR

Fig. 4 Country collaboration network

Table 6 Top ten most important institutions in terms of publications and citations

Fig. 5 Institution collaboration network

Table 7 Top ten most influent authors in terms of publications and citations

3.2 Highly Contributive Authors, Papers and Citations

Fig. 6 Author collaboration network

3.3 Thematic Analysis and Evolution

Table 9 Main information about Decade TP % DE AK d

Fig. 7 Strategic diagram of the 1989–1998 sub-period

Fig. 8 Strategic diagram of the 1999–2008 sub-period

Fig. 9 Strategic diagram of the 2009–2018 sub-period

Fig. 10 Thematic evolution on SIR through the sub-periods