Genesis and the Transformation of the Sociological Ideas since the Second Half of the 20th Century: A Bibliometric Analysis

The main purpose of this study is to identify the transformational path of ideas in Sociology in the second half of the 20th century. The objects within the paper are: identifying the most significant publications in the second half of the 20th century and building and building the main transformational path of sociological ideas in the sociology of the late 1950s. Created in 1961, SCI (Scientific Citation Index) allowed scientists to apply quantitative methods in the study of science, using analysis of bibliographic information on publications. One of the emerging methods is "Main Path analysis", based on the algorithm for revealing the most significant chains of citation in the network. Obtained in this study conclusions are based on the application of this method. The result of the study is the history of the transformation of sociology in the second half of the 20th century, obtained by analyzing the citation network between publications in 10 leading sociological journals. The conclusions obtained in this paper can also be applied to further study of the history of science using qualitative methods.