Mapping Sociology of Mental Health and Illness Articles in American Sociological Review

Using two samples of research articles published between 1936 and 2024, I map the topic structure of the sociology of mental health and illness in the American Sociological Review (ASR) journal. One sample has 116 articles on the sociology of mental health and illnesses, and the other contains 13,645 papers published across all topics since the journal’s founding. To achieve this, I used word co-occurrence networks with several other Bibliometrix package modules to investigate four study questions: 1. What percentage of articles included in ASR are from the sociology of mental health and illness, and has this percentage evolved over time? 2. Out of all journal articles, how often is this kind of research cited? 3. What fields of research does the sociology of mental health and illness cover now? 4. How has the scientific discourse on the sociology of mental health and illness changed over time? The results of this study show that, despite making up a tiny percentage of publications, the share of journal articles on mental health and illness in ASR began to increase yearly in 1999. Additionally, the sociology of mental health and illness publications frequently receive more citations than conventional journal articles. In conclusion, until 2015, articles on social ties had a significant impact on the corpus of papers on the sociology of mental health and illness in the journal; articles on families, however, were cited almost continuously over time, and starting in 2016, articles on race began to have an impact.