In search of soft power: mapping the expert community with a bibliometric network analysis

ABSTRACT

Soft power is one of the most influential concepts in the discipline of international relations, yet it is highly criticized for ambiguity and analytical weakness. Thus, through thoughtful literature reviews, scholars continue with clarifying and mapping the theory within a broader political power research programme. It is in this scholarly context that this article offers tools from a bibliometric network analysis that could be useful in understanding scholarly approaches to soft power. The constructed network of authors with edges representing connections set on keywords allows us to demonstrate the place of the soft power expert community and the proximity of corresponding research interests.

KEYWORDS:

• Soft power
• bibliometric analysis
• network analysis
• community detection
• latent space model

Acknowledgments

My interest in the community of political power scholars has started when I had joined the IPSA Research Committee on Political Power (IPSA RC36) and I appreciate the support provided by its members during these years. I am indebted to the IPSA RC36 chair Giulio M. Gallarotti for the valuable feedback on this article. All remaining shortcomings and errors are entirely my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We have plotted this 2-mode network of authors and articles with the classical Kamada-Kawai force-directed algorithm (Kamada and Kawai 1989). Co-authors who published papers together are placed closer because here graph theoretic distances between nodes are related to the geometric distances between them. This algorithm utilizes a virtual dynamic system in which every two nodes are connected by a ‘spring’ of the desirable geometric (Euclidean) distance for a final plot, then, the optimal layout is set when the total spring energy of the system is minimal. As many authors published just a single paper in the JoPP (see histograms in Figure 4), we have got such a pattern in the network. The 2-mode network of all types of the JoPP publications was plotted with another famous algorithm by Davidson and Harel (Davidson and Harel 1996) as it was implemented in the igraph package (The Davidson-Harel Layout Algorithm 2022).

2. Here in Figure 5 to demonstrate communities in the network of the JoPP authors, we have used the graphlayouts package (Schoch 2022) to implement the backbone graph layout (Nocaj et al. 2015) specially developed to emphasize a group structure if it exists.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alina V. Vladimirova

Alina V. Vladimirova is a researcher at the Centre for Southeast Asia, Australia, and Oceania at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The focus of her research is on studying international relations in Asia, especially among the ASEAN states. Since 2014 she serves as a vice-chair of the Research Committee on Political Power of the International Political Science Association (IPSA RC36).