Topics, Communities, and Diversity. Overlaying Cognitive and Social Dimensions in Argumentation Studies

In this work we analyze the social structure of the broad field of argumentation and its relationship with the topical structure to discover the dynamics of connections that exist across different communities in the field. In previous work, we demonstrated the topical richness and versatility of the community formed around the term ‘argumentation’ that enabled integration of multiple theoretical frameworks and contexts of usage. Now, we analyze the scientific production of intellectual leaders, seeking to unveil the topical diversity of their work in the field. Furthermore, we perform social network analysis of co-authorship in the field, to be able to compare it with the cognitive structure we obtained in previous work. In addition, we compare the profiles of authors in different types of communities. The analysis is performed on database containing about 10,000 publications indexed by Scopus with the word ‘argumentation’ in title, abstract, and keywords. The combination of scientometric techniques and social network analysis allows overlaying cognitive and social structure of communities and highlights the similarities and differences between the two. When combined with analysis of individual scientific profiles of the most productive and influential individuals, the work provides insights of individual strategies scientists use when choosing their topics of research and research problems. Our findings show that the structure of the field is rich with respect of diversity of topics and communities of authors. In addition, there are numerous connections among these that enable the diffusion of ideas across topics as well as several specific communities whose engagement contributes to delving deep into single topics. Individuals as drivers of these two mechanisms tend to show more diversity in their works as their production increases. These normal ecologies of science have been studied before; however, we explore it from new viewpoint that is suitable for fields not having standardized bibliographic databases with annotated articles. These open some interesting questions for future exploration.