The authors outline the key topics of contemporary social science by analyzing journal articles, indexed in SCOPUS and Web of Knowledge. For this purpose, the journals have been divided into three clusters: “Sociology and social sciences”, “Political theory and political philosophy” and “International studies”. An additional cluster is considered, which contains Russian journals recently included in SCOPUS. In each cluster several journals have been randomly chosen (at least three) and abstracts of all the articles published in these journals in 2013 have been analyzed by methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis.