Collective Identity in Contemporary Social Science: A Bibliometric Review of Global Scholarly Trends

Abstract

Collective identity has become an important research topic in contemporary social science due to its central role in understanding social movements, group formation, political participation, and shared meanings within societies. This study aims to map and analyze the global scholarly landscape, intellectual structure, and emerging research trends of collective identity studies through a bibliometric approach. Data were retrieved from the Scopus database and analyzed using VOSviewer software to examine publication patterns, co-authorship networks, institutional and country collaborations, citation structures, and keyword co-occurrence relationships. The findings reveal that collective identity research is built upon a core conceptual foundation connecting identity, sociology, social movements, and collective memory, while collaboration networks remain fragmented into relatively small research groups. Country-level analysis indicates that the United States acts as a major research hub connecting European and North American academic networks. Citation analysis demonstrates that influential contributions primarily originate from political science and social psychology, particularly studies related to identity formation and social identity theory. Furthermore, keyword analysis shows a transition from classical sociological and psychological perspectives toward digital, computational, and narrative approaches. This study contributes a comprehensive mapping of collective identity research by identifying its intellectual foundations, collaboration structures, and future research directions, highlighting its development as an interdisciplinary field bridging sociology, political science, psychology, and digital media studies.