Mapping Citations and Conceptual Terms Central to the Study of Organizing and Democracy

How can political science researchers use citation mapping tools to refine the development of research on complex theoretical concepts? Citation mapping, a powerful research tool commonly used in the natural sciences, is not yet widely used in political science. This study illustrates citation mapping’s capabilities by producing citation maps of academic research on the term “organizing.” We describe our multi-step methodological approach for generating citation maps and demonstrate how these maps can be analyzed to produce insights about themes, potential gaps, canonical literature, and levels of dialogue across research streams. The paper concludes by outlining future research possibilities based on this study’s citation mapping approach.