MAPPING TRENDING TOPICS IN SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODS

The Social Research Methods is a scientific domain facing a transforma- tion mainly due to: i) new challenges induced by the complexity of the con- temporary society (Castellani, Hafferty, 2009), ii) the availability of different kind of data and new data sources (e.g. data derived by social media, micro blogging platforms, tagging practices) and, iii) data analytics tools that merge Statistics and Information Science techniques. As a result, scholars need to develop new approaches to deal with the design and all the consequent phases of the research. Our aim is to analyze the current literature looking for the trending topics and trying to delineate the leading edges of the Social Re- search Methods. In this paper we explore the scientific literature related to this domain, building a bibliography database collected in the period 2011-2017 and published in the first five Journals having the maximum Impact Factor in the field. The