One hundred years of social work in the Spanish language: an approach to the disciplinary debates of the scientific literature in Web of Science.

Abstract

The article reports on a study focused on the main Spanish-speaking debates in the scientific literature of social work, commemorating a century of disciplinary development. The study uses a bibliometric design to explore scientific production in the Web of Science database, covering the period from 2008 to 2024, conducting two searches within the Social Work category in the main WoS catalogue. Among the main findings, a significant asymmetry between scientific production in English and Spanish emerges, highlighting the predominance of Anglo-Saxon publications and the underrepresentation of works in Spanish: there are differences of 100 to 1 in total publications and from 200 to 1 in citations recorded. Through an analysis of the conceptual structure of the documents analysed, the study identifies two central and prominent clusters of debates in the Spanish-speaking disciplinary scientific literature, focusing on concepts such as family, community, resilience, disability, networks, social work, social intervention, education, and human rights. These themes suggest they form the foundation upon which much of the Spanish-speaking social work debates are built. The analysis underscores the need to strengthen the visibility and impact of scientific production in Spanish in order to balance the geopolitical representation of knowledge and aim for its democratisation.