The Academic Literature and its Increasing Emphasis on Prejudice and Social Justice

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In previous scholarly work (here and here), I documented a marked increase of references to prejudice in US, UK and Spanish news media content.

The work summarized here investigates the prevalence dynamics of prejudice-denoting terms in 175 million academic papers published in all fields of knowledge. We quantify the prevalence of words denoting prejudice against ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, minority religious sentiment, age, body weight and disability in SSORC abstracts over the period 1970-2020.

Aggregate prevalence of sets of terms denoting different prejudice types in academic abstracts from the SSORC Corpus. The 2020 to 1970 (or earliest nonzero value, see ‡ symbol) frequency ratio of every set of terms is shown on the upper left of each subplot. The dashed gray line is a least squares polynomial fit of degree one since the first nonzero frequency in each time series.

We next examine the relationship between the prevalence of terms denoting specific prejudice types in scholarly abstracts and the prevalence of those terms in news media written content. Often, terms denoting a new prejudice type appear to emerge first in the academic literature and then spread to news media. Such is the case in the 1970s for the prejudice types of homophobia and ageism. Similar dynamics occur for Islamophobia, ableism, and transphobia in later years. Fatphobia however displays the opposite dynamic, with pioneering occurrence happening first in news media and emergence in the academic literature happening afterwards.

Aggregate prevalence of sets of terms denoting different types of prejudice in 175 million abstracts from the SSORC Corpus and in twenty-five million news and opinion articles from eleven popular British and American news media outlets.

We next apply factor analysis to derive common variability among all the time series of prejudice-denoting terms in scholarly content and news media discourse. This was done to uncover underlying factors encapsulated in the raw time series data of each prejudice denouncing term in both scholarly and news media content.

A single factor (blue trend in the Figure below) encapsulates 56% of the overall variance of the 25 prejudice-denoting terms in scholarly content. The factor displays steady growth from the 1980s until around the early 2010s and a marked increase post-2014. A single factor (dashed orange trend in the Figure below) captures 71% percent of the overall variance of the twenty-five prejudice-denoting terms in news media articles. This factor appears very stable from the 1970s until 2010 and then displays an abrupt increase post-2010.

First factors in two factor analyses of a set of twenty-five terms denoting different types of prejudice in 175 million abstracts from the SSORC Corpus and in twenty-five million news and opinion articles from eleven popular U.S. and U.K. news media outlets. The vertical dotted line highlights the year 2015.

Prevalence of Social Justice Terms in the Scholarly Literature

We next examine the prevalence in academic abstracts of an additional set of terms often associated with social justice discourse

Prevalence of twenty-five terms associated with social justice discourse in academic abstracts from the SSORC Corpus. The dashed gray line is a least squares polynomial fit of degree one since the first nonzero frequency in each time series.

A factor analysis of the terms denoting social justice discourse in scholarly and news media content displays very similar patterns to those already documented previously for the factor analysis of the prejudice-denoting terms. The factor derived from scholarly content displays steady growth from the 1980s until the early 2010s at which point the rate of growth of the factor increases substantially. In contrast, the factor derived from the news media content is relatively stable from the 1970s until around 2013. Post-2013, it starts to grow abruptly.

Factor analyses of a set of twenty-five terms denoting social justice discourse in 175 million abstracts from the SSORC Corpus and in twenty-five million news and opinion articles from eleven popular U.S. and U.K. news media outlets.

Concluding thoughts

We have presented a pioneering analysis about the prevalence of terms denoting prejudice and social justice discourse in the academic literature and its concomitant prominence in news media content.

Our results suggest that prevalence in the academic literature of terms denoting prejudice and social justice discourse has been growing steadily and diffusely since the 1980s. This is mostly not the case in news media content where the prevalence of such terminology stayed relatively flat from the 1970s until the early 2010s. Post-2010, both academic publishing and news media display an abrupt increase in the prevalence of prejudice and social justice discourse in their content but the pattern appears more acute in news media.