Social Indicators Research: A Retrospective Using Bibliometric Analysis

Social Indicators Research (SIR) publishes novel and groundbreaking research focusing on social indicators related to quality of life and sustainability. Using bibliometrics, this study aims to offer a retrospective of the major trends (e.g., publication, citation, and top contributing authors, institutions, and countries) and intellectual structure of SIR. The retrospective indicates that SIR, which has grown substantially in productivity and impact, attracts contributions worldwide, notably from the USA, with 11 major themes revealed between 1974 and 2019. Using a zero-inflated negative binomial regression, this study also reveals the factors that influence the citation count of SIR publications, namely article age, number of author keywords, title novelty, title length, USA affiliation, and number of authors. Noteworthily, this study, which represents the inaugural review of SIR, should be useful for readers to gain rich insights into the state of research on social indicators related to quality of life and sustainability.