FILLING THE KNOWLEDGE GAP. THE EVOLUTION OF TRENDS IN ACADEMIC PAPERS FOCUSSED ON THE PHENOMENON OF IMMIGRATION

Rezumat

This research started from Zygmunt Bauman’s paradigm, according to which, society is rapidly changing. This fluidity, captured in the term “liquid modernity”, is asserting modifications on both general and individual levels. The phenomenon of immigration is a complex, multifaceted one, for two reasons. First, to the fact that is generated by multiple factors, such as famine, wars, economic hardships and most recently even climate change. Secondly, it can be associated with multiple domains of research both within and even outside of social sciences. Thus, immigration represents a theme which grants the researcher a certain level of freedom, in choosing paradigms, perspectives and methods applied in the research. Julio Cesar dos Reis and Mauro Dalle Lucca Tosi believe that by studying the trends within a scientific field, one can understand the main tendencies within a certain subject and even predict future ones. Due to the fact that it is a relatively new phenomenon, there are no papers which have analyzed the evolution of the theme of immigration within academic articles, what are the main perspectives and paradigms. This paper provides an in-depth analysis meant to identify the ways in which academic research focused on immigration has evolved In the last decades. The main research method used in this paper is document analysis. The research unit chosen for this paper was the scientific article which included “immigration” as a keyword. All the scientific articles included in my research were retrieved from the Web of Science database.. In my analysis, I Looked at two different dimensions. On one hand, I evaluated the content of the article, looking at aspects such as: peer-reviews, study sample, flaws and limitations within the study. I looked at key-words, to identify the main ones and to see if there was any change within the themes with which immigration is associated. Immigration began to become popular as an academic topic starting with 2010, when there were more articles on the subject than ever before. Their number increased signifficantly once again after 2015, when the immigrant crisis occurred. Recently Immigration was associated with assimilation rather than Integration. Most researches are quantitative, focussing on Peoples attitudes. The paper will discuss these and further preliminary findings.