Terminology of Migration Studies

A Corpus Analysis of Research Papers in Social Sciences

Abstract

Migration studies is a new, rapidly developing research area whose terminology is being established at the intersection of various social sciences. This article undertakes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of terms associated with migration, conducted on a 281,000-word corpus of research articles in social sciences, published in leading academic journals. Our analysis involves corpus processing with AntConc software and semantic tagging of terms that contain the words migrant and migration, with the purpose of detecting the semantic categories that migration-related terms belong to and identifying what areas of research in the field they outline. The qualitative analysis proves two directions in migration studies, focusing on migrant communities as national groups and experience of individual migrants. Semantically, there are two approaches to studying migration: time-oriented, referring to past, present, future, and subject-oriented, e.g. geography, economy, demography, etc.