Depicting communities of Romani studies: on the who, when and where of Roma related scientific publications
Résumé
Contemporary research on Roma from diverse disciplines has grown strongly during the last years. This is the first bibliometric study on the field of Romani studies considering the period 1997–2018 with the aims of mapping scholar’s disciplines and analyzing localization and their thematic contributions. The world evolution of Roma research topics and their citation impacts has been analyzed using a Network Analysis approach. The Scopus database was used to retrieve bibliographic records on Gypsy and Roma research. The bibliometric analysis of scholarly endeavour identifies three principal clusters: ‘History and Culture’, ‘Education’, and ‘Discrimination and Policy’. Results shows that scholars became more attentive to Roma issues as it became an important topic in public debate. Informed by this analysis, questions are raised about how to strengthen connectivity, collaborative research and knowledge exchange beyond national and disciplinary borders. In the term citation map among the most followed themes by number of normalized average quotations, the topics of ‘Discrimination and Policy’ analysis undeniably emerges. In the current historical moment characterised by rising ethno-nationalism and racism we intend that this paper informs further research that will deepen our understanding of the contributions of different social science disciplines with regards to epistemology, methodology and impact.