The emergence of computational social science: Intellectual integration or persistent fragmentation?

Abstract

Has the emerging field of computational social science grown increasingly intellectually integrated with the passage of time, or does the field remain fragmented into several distinct epistemic communities? Because research-based literature is still inconclusive in this regard, the authors exploited scientific-citations and co-citation data to study the development of computational social science's intellectual structure. The findings suggest that network science has maintained centrality over the years. Contrary to common perceptions however, the field has not become more integrated over time. Rather, the network of co-citation among the field's key authors exhibits ever more extensive clustering and greater average path length over 2000-2020, indicating that the discipline is fracturing into various sub-communities, with loose connections to each other.