Value conflicts through social media? Analyzing co-authorship patterns and the framing of value research in social sciences (1943-2020)

The paper analyzes the scholarly output on value change and provides a novel and systematic examination of one of the most relevant research fields in social sciences in the last six decades. Current public and academic discussions circle around contested concepts such as polarization, value conflicts and value change, indicating a growing interest in changing attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions of citizens in contemporary democracies. One prominent explanation for these changes is the advent of global connectivity and the emergence of social and digital media platforms in the 2000s, in particular the extent to which they might be contributing to the creation of ‘echo chambers’, ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘fragmented public spheres’. Scholars argue that these new phenomena affect people’s values, erode democratic principles and amplify value conflicts. However, it is still rather contested whether and how democratic/basic human values change, and to what extent social media may (or may not) contribute to value change and value conflicts. Our objective is to provide a quantitative, longitudinal and systematic review of the state of the art on value research and its interaction with the literature on social media. We use relevant keywords to collect 4,259 articles from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, spanning a time period from 1943 to 2020. We use social network techniques (i.a. keyword co-occurrence analysis, community detection algorithms, centrality measures) to examine three main aspects of the data. Firstly, we analyze whether and to what extent we identify ideational or collaborative clusters (‘invisible colleges’) in the research on values, by looking at who has published with whom on which topics (using keywords and abstracts), and in which journals. Furthermore, we analyze the citations of the research articles in this research field to detect ‘authoritative texts and scholars’ that shape the field of value research. By doing so, we are able to trace back the development of the research field and account for (scientific) attention spans. At the same time, we embed the current focus on social media and value polarization in the broader research on value change and look at how both are interrelated or disconnected. Our paper offers a first systematic (bibliometric) analysis of a fast growing research field, sheds new light on how scholars collaborate, frame their research and how a research field diversifies and adjusts to new developments, such as the establishment of social media platforms.