I checked 9 sociology journals on Wednesday, June 24, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period June 17 to June 23, I found 9 new paper(s) in 4 journal(s).

Social Forces

Whose merit, which redistribution? Elites, taxes, and transfers in Brazil and South Africa
Livio Silva-Muller, Graziella Moraes Silva, Matias LĂłpez
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Scholarship often treats two dimensions of meritocracy as interchangeable: if success is due to hard work, poverty must be due to a lack of effort. We contrast elites’ perceptions about their own success with their perceptions about the lack of success of others. We posit that these two dimensions—merit of self and merit of others—are distinct, with different implications for redistributive preferences, and varying salience across national contexts. Using data from elite surveys in Brazil and South Africa, we examine whose merit matters for giving income to policies (transfers) versus taking income from policies (taxation). We show that elites are more likely to credit their own success to hard work than to attribute poverty to lack of effort, and that these two dimensions are independent. Perceiving the poor as effortless, rather than elites as hard-working, predict opposition to transfers. In contrast, elites' perceptions of self play a context-dependent role. In Brazil, they are associated with opposition to taxation but are confounded with political identification, while in South Africa, redistributive preferences are structured primarily by racial identification. We interpret these cross-national differences considering distinct trajectories of state-building and inequality.

Social Networks

When do acquaintance networks grow? Life events, civic participation, and social dynamics
Benjamín Muñoz, Alejandro Plaza, Vicente Espinoza
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Dynamic programming for calculating the triad census
Ryan A. Cook
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Introducing VINA: An engaging and ethically responsible interface to collect social network data including cognitive social structures on smartphones
Tom Nijs, Tobias H. Stark, ZsĂłfia Boda
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Social Science Research

Generic title: Not a research article
Corrigendum to ‘Do sanctuary policies increase crime? Contrary evidence from a county-level investigation in the United States’ [Soc. Sci. Res. 106 (2022) 102743]
Marta Ascherio
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Risk, return, and resonance: Symbolic considerations in everyday stock selection
Adam S. Hayes, LĂ©na Pellandini-SimĂĄnyi, Ambreen Tour Ben-Shmuel, Jan-Hendrik Bucher
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Reassessing the gendered link between maternal employment and adult children's labor market participation: A trajectory-based approach
Xueqian Chen
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The role of sanitary pads in school achievement in low-income settings
Anoushka Patel, William G. Axinn, Dirgha J. Ghimire
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Socius

Visualizing the Adoption of Large Language Models across Sociology Subfields
Likun Cao
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Generative large language models (LLMs) entered scientific writing at scale after the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022, but their adoption in sociological research remains largely unmapped. This visualization estimates the share of LLM-modified sentences in 1.49 million abstracts from sociology papers indexed in OpenAlex between January 2018 and December 2025, using the distributional alpha estimator developed by Liang and colleagues. By tracing change over time, across substantive subfields, and across author groups, it provides a field-level view of how rapidly LLM-assisted writing has diffused through sociology. The visualization highlights three patterns. First, estimated LLM modification rose from near zero before late 2022 to 24.3 percent of abstract sentences in July–December 2025. Second, adoption varies substantially and persistently across subfields: empirical and applied areas show the highest estimated uptake, while theory-oriented subfields remain lowest. Third, data from the post-ChatGPT era show that LLM-assisted writing is also more prevalent among younger scholars, authors from less prestigious institutions, and publications in less prestigious outlets. Together, these patterns show that LLM use in sociology has become widespread but remains unevenly distributed across scholarly communities.
Studying the West and Ignoring the Rest: Do Stylized Facts Established in the Christian West Generalize?
Landon Schnabel
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Social science seeks to uncover general patterns, yet much research centers on what the author calls WEIRDS (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, and secular) societies, which are dominated by one religion, Christianity, and shaped by its legacy and continuing influence. This WEIRDS focus is especially problematic in studies of religion, as it risks mistaking Christianity-influenced patterns for universal trends. Using global data from wave 7 of the World Values Survey covering 66 countries, this study examines three stylized “facts” about religion: (1) younger people are less religious than older people, (2) women are more religious than men, and (3) religiosity opposes scientific views. Findings reveal considerable variation across religious traditions and cultural contexts, challenging the global applicability of each. Across the world population, younger people are actually more religious than older people. Gender differences in religiosity vary by tradition, with men more religious in Muslim contexts depending on how religiosity is measured. And the relationship between religiosity and science attitudes is not universally negative, with some groups showing positive associations. By demonstrating that stylized facts from WEIRDS do not generalize globally, this study underscores the need for broader cultural representation in social science.