The Atlas of Italian social statistics is the group’s first joint initiative: a science mapping study charting the thematic map (who works on what) and the geographic map (where) of the discipline.
The visualisations below are interactive and based on aggregated data: no map refers to individual people or individual publications. Sources: Scopus for publications (2000–2025) and the Italian Ministry of University (MUR) staff database for the list of scholars in the STAT-03/B field (faculty members and postdoctoral fellows). Details on coverage and data updates in the Methodological note.
The group in numbers
Composition of the field
The scholars of the field by academic position: full and associate professors, researchers, and postdoctoral fellows.
Scientific output over time
Annual publications of the field, with a three-year moving average. The slider below the chart narrows the time window.
Research themes
The themes of Italian social statistics emerge from the analysis of publication keywords: words that frequently occur together outline the main research strands of the discipline, editorially curated. The area of each tile is proportional to the number of publications; click a theme to open its keywords. Strictly clinical publications, to which the field contributes methodologically, are not included in the thematic maps (details in the Methodological note).
How themes have changed
Trend topics
The most distinctive keywords of each period: the position of the bubble marks the median year of use, its size the number of publications, and the segment the interquartile range.
The geography of themes
Where social statistics is practised in Italy: regions by number of scholars, with universities and the regional thematic profile on hover.
International collaborations
The countries of co-authors of the field’s publications and the evolution of the share of works with at least one international co-author.
Journals
The journals where the field publishes most. The filter shows the most frequent journals for each theme.
Publication types and open access
The network of collaborations across Italian universities
Methodological note
The Atlas is built with bibliometrix from the publications indexed in Scopus (2000–2025) of the scholars of the STAT-03/B field — faculty members and postdoctoral fellows — identified through the MUR staff database. Scopus does not cover the field’s entire scientific output — many monographs and contributions in Italian are not indexed — so the figures should be read as a snapshot of internationally indexed production.
Themes derive from the analysis of co-occurrences between author keywords (normalised and mapped to uniform forms; Louvain clustering on the co-occurrence network) with editorially curated labels; strictly clinical publications are counted in the totals but excluded from the thematic maps. All visualisations report aggregated data only: individual authors or individual publications cannot be traced. Every chart also offers its data as a table.
Data extraction: July 2026; the Atlas is regenerated periodically. To report errors or omissions, please write to the group through the Contact page.
© 2026 Massimo Aria — Atlas of Italian social statistics: concept, data processing and visualisations. All rights reserved.