Video: using co-citation analysis with R to assess the chances of scientific communication

Terminology matters for science. If people use different words for the same thing, or even worse, the same word for different things, scientific communication turns into a dialogue of the deaf. European Radical Right Studies are a field where this is potentially a big problem: we use labels like “New”, “Populist”, “Radical”, “Extreme” or even “Extremist” with abandon. 

But how bad is it really? In a recent chapter (author’s version, not paywalled), I argue that communication in Radical Right studies still works. Texts using all 50 shades of “Right” are still cited together, indicating that later scholars realised they were all talking about (more or less) the same thing.

I have written a number of short blogs about the change in terminology over time, the extraction of the co-citation network, and the interpretation of the findings. But sometimes, all this reading is getting a bit much, and so I tried something different: using some newfangled software for noobs, I turned my findings into a short video. Have a look for yourself and tell me what you think.

The Extreme / Radical Right network of co-citations

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