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Abstract

Following Lazer et al.'s (2009) article, computational social science is often described as an interdisciplinary field merging social and computational sciences. However, the actual disciplinary status of this field remains unclear. This article examines whether computational social science has emerged as a fully fledged interdisciplinary discipline or whether it functions rather as a multidisciplinary research project. The theoretical framework draws on the distinction between interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research projects previously applied in studies of the development of cognitive science. While interdisciplinary fields involve the formation of a new disciplinary identity and institutional infrastructure, multidisciplinary projects represent collaborations between existing disciplines without the emergence of an independent scientific field.

The empirical part of the study is based on an analysis of educational programs in computational social science collected from the community-curated repository Awesome Computational Social Science, initiated by the GESIS Institute and maintained by the research community. For each program, data were collected on the year of establishment, program level (BA, MA, PhD), as well as country and region, and a curriculum analysis was conducted. Course titles were coded according to SCOPUS disciplinary categories: each course was assigned up to three disciplinary tags, which were then aggregated into broader categories (STEM, Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), CSS, and Other). Courses were further classified by type (core/elective) and content (field/method).

These results allow us to assess the disciplinary structure of CSS educational programs and its evolution over time, as well as to answer the question of whether computational social science is emerging as an integrated interdisciplinary field or remains a multidisciplinary configuration dominated by computational and methodological approaches. They also allow us to assess the extent to which CSS is being formed as an independent discipline, whether the expansion of educational programs in this area is justified, and which regional models of their development (USA, Europe, Asia) can serve as a guide for the further institutional development of this field.