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Abstract: In this study, I analyze the main topics and results introduced in recent publications in the sociology of religion. Briefly touching upon the practical use of identification of major topics covered in published literature during the process of publication output planning, we continue the article with the thematical analysis of those journal articles in the sociology of religion, in which the presented research did not focus on a specific religion or on the believers of a specific religion. We examined the adherence to this criterion of lack of specification in 173 articles published in leading international journals between 2010 and 2013, from the journal list of the Institute of Sociology of the HAS (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), from which 66 journal articles were coded and classified with inductive categorization consistent with grounded theory. Throughout the process, we managed to identify 6 main topics (Secularization, Economy, Sexuality, Politics, Personal Satisfaction, and Well-Being, Social CoExistence, and Cooperation). We then further divided each of these key themes into subtopics, and we examined the studies further, according to the institutional affiliation of first author(s), institutional affiliation of journal editors, and geographic location of journal publishers. Results show that the identified topics and topic preferences are characteristics of a subset of a Western sociological knowledge, produced mainly by agents embedded in an Anglo-Saxon research environment.
Keywords: publication analysis, thematical analysis, sociology of religion, Anglophone dominance
Introduction
In spite of post-secularization approaches becoming more and more common in professional sociological thinking, and of a relatively widespread consensus regarding the necessity of research in the public engagement of religion, religious people, and groups; in a Hungarian research environment there was not any organized, easy to navigate and relevant information source available that would have facilitated the international dissemination of research in sociology of religion.1 Regarding Christianity, I attempted to solve this deficiency in my article published in Szociológiai Szemle, where I introduced and analyzed topics connected to Christian believers and Christian values - according to their distribution related to each other, as well as their geographical-cultural distribution - that were covered in articles published by the most respected international sociological journals (Tóth 2015a). In this article, I am attempting to do something similar by investigating not specifically Christianity or any...