Mapping Social Impact: A Bibliometric Analysis

Social dimension is a fundamental element in the evaluation of initiatives and policies that are demanded and promoted by public and private organizations as well as society as a whole. Thus, there is a thriving interest in social impact research, especially from the point of view of its measurement and valuation. In this work, we explored the rising attention on the concept of social impact to identify salient agents in the field and categorize the conceptual structure of research. To achieve this, we used evaluative and relational techniques combining traditional bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer and a text mining analysis based on natural processing language (NLP) to search for documents with the term “social impact” in the title. The documents were extracted from the database Web of Science (WoS) for the period of 1938–2020. As a result, we mapped the concept of social impact from up to 1677 documents, providing an overview of the topics in which the concept was used (e.g., health, finance, environment and development, etc.) and the trends of research. This work seeks to serve as a roadmap that reflects not only the evolution of social impact but also future lines of research that require attention.