European Union Politics – en tidskrift och dess invisible college

Abstract

Author Cocitation Analysis (ACA), multidimensional scaling (MDS) and Social Network Analysis (SNA), has been used to analyze and visualize the invisible college of the journal European Union Politics. The concept invisible college was first introduced in the fifteenth century, through the creation of the “the Royal Society of London”, and it was reintroduced in the 1960:ies and the 1970:ies by scholars such as Price and Crane. It is said to have been interpreted in as many ways as there are authors who have used it. Here it has been used synonymously with the term citation network. To show changes over time in the invisible college and in its research themes and trends, citation data from two separate periods of time have been compared; 2003-2004 and 2007-2008. The analysis shows a shift in the invisible college on the actor level –such as changes in density, actors’ positions in the network - and changes in the research agenda towards public opinion research and integration research. Connected to these trends is the theme of “Eurosceptism” – which had a breakthrough after the first period of analysis. This seems to follow the development of the researched object itself (the European Union). The invisible college of European Union Politics has been understood to be relatively young, as is the journal and the field of European Union Politics.