Scientific production on welfare regimes, social protection and social policies in Latin America, 2000-2026: A preliminary bibliometric analysis with a conservative operational corpus

Abstract

This preprint offers a preliminary and conditional bibliometric analysis of Scopus-indexed scientific production on welfare regimes, social protection, and social policy in Latin America between 2000 and 2026. The study starts from a Scopus export of 6,614 records, filters the article and review document types (5,635 records), and applies conservative deduplication by DOI and EID identifiers, producing the working base of 5,628 records on which all empirical analyses of this version run. The project additionally declares a three-level thematic relevance classification whose core corpus reaches 3,128 records, but that classification, built in earlier phases of the project, is not yet independently verifiable and is presented only as declared architecture, not as the universe of the results. Results describe temporal trends, sources, recurring vocabularies, and a keyword co-occurrence network with community detection. The manuscript does not claim causality, does not declare a definitive corpus, and does not equate Scopus with the total state of the art in Latin America. This preprint offers a preliminary, reproducible, and critically delimited bibliometric map of Scopus-indexed visibility on welfare, social protection, and social policy in Latin America, distinguishing verifiable empirical results, declared classification architecture, and the epistemic limits of the corpus.