The references of the nations: a bibliometric analysis of UN General Assembly resolutions since 1945

This paper carries out the first-ever bibliometric analysis of the United Nations General Assembly's (UNGA) production since its foundation. Resolutions adopted by the organ reflect the degree of interstate consensus, thus providing a valuable record of the evolution of multilateralism and political ideas on the global level. Given that new resolutions traditionally begin by citing past ones, the resulting network of references offers a wealth of information on the Assembly’s most relevant themes over time. By applying citation analysis to the full corpus of approximately 18 thousand resolutions adopted by the organization since 1945, we are able to answer multiple questions on the features of UNGA output: What are the most cited resolutions of all time? Are citations concentrated in a few influential documents or dispersed more evenly? Are there thematic clusters within the citation network? How responsive is UNGA activity to exogenous developments in international politics and can we delineate historical patterns based on the different themes prioritized over the years? This paper introduces the dataset containing all UNGA resolutions ever approved and presents some early descriptive findings on these queries.