This study presents an original, integrative bibliometric investigation of how inequality, social cohesion, and health related scholarship has evolved, diffused, and structured itself across global academic networks. Drawing exclusively on the theoretical, empirical, and methodological traditions represented in the provided reference corpus, the article develops a comprehensive mapping of how research on income inequality, social capital, neighborhood effects, health disparities, social cohesion, and scientific impact metrics has been produced, organized, and evaluated within the international knowledge system. The study is anchored in the conceptual foundations of social capital theory, neighborhood ecology, political economy of health, and scientometrics, and it is operationalized through the methodological principles of bibliometric network analysis as articulated by van Eck and Waltman and their collaborators. The core objective is to demonstrate how intellectual structures, thematic clusters, and epistemic hierarchies emerge when scientific knowledge about inequality and social cohesion is observed through the lens of citation, co citation, and keyword networks.

The study situates itself at the intersection of two powerful traditions. The first is the substantive tradition that links income inequality, social cohesion, neighborhood context, and health outcomes, as articulated in seminal works by Kawachi and Kennedy, Lynch and colleagues, Sampson and his collaborators, Coburn, Manstead, Musterd, and many others. This literature demonstrates that inequality is not merely an economic condition but a deeply social and psychological force that shapes trust, belonging, mental health, and mortality. The second tradition is the methodological and epistemological tradition of bibliometrics, as represented by Hirsch, van Eck and Waltman, Kaur and colleagues, Meho, Marshakova Shaikevich, and others, which provides the analytical instruments to examine how such knowledge is produced, diffused, evaluated, and hierarchically organized within the global scientific system.

Using descriptive and interpretive bibliometric methods, this study reconstructs how research on social cohesion and inequality has clustered into interconnected thematic and disciplinary domains. It shows that public health, sociology, urban studies, psychology, and information science form a tightly interconnected intellectual ecosystem. VOSviewer based mapping principles are used to interpret how keywords, citations, and collaboration patterns generate visible structures of knowledge that mirror real world social divisions, power relations, and institutional inequalities. The article also critically examines the role of global research hierarchies, particularly the dominance of high income countries as defined by the World Bank, in shaping which forms of inequality and social cohesion receive scientific attention and legitimacy.

The findings demonstrate that inequality and social cohesion research is characterized by strong conceptual cohesion but uneven global representation. Theoretical models that link income inequality to psychosocial stress, erosion of trust, and weakened community bonds dominate the citation core of the field, while structural and political economy perspectives emphasizing neoliberalism, class, and institutional power remain less centrally cited despite their conceptual importance. The bibliometric structures also reveal that health oriented studies of social cohesion have greater visibility and citation impact than sociopolitical critiques, reflecting broader trends in the governance of scientific legitimacy.