Venue-author coupling for Russian social sciences: maps and use cases

Abstract

The article focuses on venue-author coupling (VAC), a method for determining distances between scholars based on the degree of overlap in the journals in which they have published. These distances can serve as a basis for constructing “science maps”, that is, relational representations of scientific specialties. The first part of the text offers a comprehensive review of studies that employ VAC, demonstrating the connection between this mode of work in scientometrics (bibliographic coupling, co-citation, co-word, etc.) and affiliation metaphors in sociology (in particular, the one proposed by Georg Simmel under the idea of “social circles”), and discusses the characteristics of contemporary international and Russian empirical work on the topic. The second part of the text presents two maps (also available online) built on data from the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) on Russian “social scientists” (24 452 authors from 9 specialties, with publications in 10 008 journals) and sociologists (8 578 authors, with publications in 3 320 journals). Whereas the first dataset limits authors by a h-index of more than 10, the second includes all sociologists appearing in the list under the corresponding subject category in the RSCI. The number of authors’ publications in journals was normalized using the tf-idf technique, and then the dimensionality of both datasets was reduced to just two dimensions using a combination of SVD and UMAP algorithms. To improve the interpretation of the results, clustering using the HDBSCAN was also applied to a portion of the data. The results section shows the distribution of the “social scientists” according to the obtained coordinates, revealing a distinction between established major disciplines (psychology, economics) and those that are relatively young in the Russian context (political science, sociology). Using the case of history (included in the study as its official category incorporates anthropologists), it is shown that VAC is capable of detecting disciplinary communities better than the high-level classifications. The map of Russian sociologists reveals a distribution of authors in which institutional and territorial principles prove far more important than the thematic one. This supports previous descriptions of Russian sociology as consisting of different academic cultures (Westernized, locally oriented, and mixed form). The concluding section examines in detail both the limitations of the VAC approach to mapping science and the ways it can be used by different audiences, from academic administrators to the authors themselves, whose positions are mapped in this study. It is argued that science mapping enterprise should move to the peripheral contexts where “normal science” practices may not be present, in order to test both limitations and potential of its methods.

For citation: Pecherskikh, A. (2026) Venue-author coupling for Russian social sciences: maps and use cases. Russia’s Directions. Vol. 4. No. 2. P. 36–74.

Additional Info

Submitted: April 1, 2026

Reviewed: April 13, 2026

Copyright: © Auhtors, 2026

Distribution: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)