Publication and Collaboration

Patterns in Autonomy Research – A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Research on territorial autonomy has gained new impetus in recent years. This research note presents a first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of autonomy studies. It introduces the Territorial Autonomy Literature Datasets (TALD), surveys of over 800 peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed articles published between 1945 and 2018. The study reveals significant imbalances in gender and origin of authors, methodological approaches and studied cases. While the data shows some trend towards greater diversity and team collaboration, we observe that autonomy research is still dominated by male and Western-based scholars, and by single-authored small-n studies on sub-national regions in Europe and post-Soviet Eurasia. Thematically, the analysis shows that researchers almost exclusively study autonomous regions in the context of conflict regulation and minority accommodation.