The evolution of recent research on Catalan literature through the production of PhD theses: a bibliometric and social network analysis

The PhD thesis is one of the most important expressions of research in the humanities, and provides a fairly good representation of the personal interests of researchers. It also represents the culmination of the education of students, in which they are asked to present an original research project and demonstrate their research skills to a thesis defence committee composed of university lecturers, academics and specialists. PhD theses are therefore a good reflection of the predominant lines of work and research at universities and other academic institutions. Furthermore, as PhD candidates must have a supervisor and obtain the approval of the academic community represented by the thesis defence committee, PhD theses are a good source of information on the social structure of research (López Yepes 2002; Delgado et al. 2006). This aspect is especially interesting in some areas of the social sciences and in the humanities which, unlike the experimental sciences, involve practically no collaborative work (Hagstrom 1965; Bourke 1997; Molteni and Zulueta 2002; Ardanuy 2008).