@article{Bijak_30_32,
author = {Bijak, Jakub and Silverman, Eric and Courgeau, Daniel and Franck, Robert},
title={{Quantifying paradigm change in demography}},
journal = {Demographic Research},
volume = {30},
number = {32},
pages = {911--924},
doi = {10.4054/DemRes.2014.30.32},
year = {2014},
abstract = {Background: Demography is a uniquely empirical research area amongst the social sciences. We posit that the same principle of empiricism should be applied to studies of the population sciences as a discipline, contributing to greater self-awareness amongst its practitioners. 

Objective: The paper aims to include measurable data in the study of changes in selected demographic paradigms and perspectives. 

Methods: The presented analysis is descriptive and is based on a series of simple measures obtained from the free online tool Google Books Ngram Viewer, which includes frequencies of word groupings (n-grams) in different collections of books digitised by Google. 

Results: The tentative findings corroborate the shifts in the demographic paradigms identified in the literature -- from cross-sectional, through longitudinal, to event-history and multilevel approaches. 

Conclusions: These findings identify a promising area of enquiry into the development of demography as a social science discipline. We postulate that more detailed enquiries in this area in the future could lead to establishing History of Population Thought as a new sub-discipline within population sciences. },
URL = {https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol30/32/},
eprint = {https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol30/32/30-32.pdf}
}