Interactive Visualization: The Intellectual Sources Beyond Sport Marketing Quarterly, 1999 to 2026

This visualization maps what Sport Marketing Quarterly articles cite outside the journal from 1999 to 2026: every work that at least two of the 639 articles the journal published during this period name in their reference lists, nearly 2,900 works drawn from more than 26,000 references. It is the companion to the intellectual lineage, which maps the citations within the journal, and one element of the same larger project that draws on both the journal’s articles and the association’s conference programs to trace how sport marketing scholarship has developed over twenty-five years. The articles sit in a band along the top, each a dot placed by year and colored by topic family. Below them, each cited work is a dot placed at its own publication year, sized by the number of SMQ articles citing it, and sorted into rows by the kind of source, from sport management and marketing journals to psychology, business, the trade press, and books. The journals cited most often within the large rows have rows of their own. Each curve connects a citing article to a work it cites, in the color of the article’s topic family, so the horizontal distance between its two ends shows how old the cited work was when it was used.

How to explore the visualization:

• Hover over an article to view its title, authors, year, and topic, together with the works it cites, grouped by outlet. Hover over a cited work to view its author, year, title, and outlet, together with the SMQ articles that cite it.
• Click an article or a work to bring its full set of connections into focus. Every connected dot is highlighted, and the complete lists appear beneath the visualization, where each entry can be selected in turn.
• Click a topic family in the legend to keep only the works its articles cite, click a row name to keep only that kind of source, or click a period header to show only the citations made by articles from that period.
• Refine the view with the size key, where clicking a circle keeps only the works cited by at least that many articles, and the search box for author surnames, title words, and outlet names. Reset restores the full view, and Escape clears the current selection.

The four periods (1999 to 2006, 2007 to 2013, 2014 to 2019, and 2020 to 2026) are divided at three developments outside the journal: social media platforms opened to the public in 2006, smartphones and esports reached mass scale in 2013, and the pandemic closed venues in 2020. Because the boundaries come from the industry rather than from the articles, the periods can show whether the journal’s sources changed when the industry did.

The visualization is designed for a desktop screen. Open it in a new tab for the full-size view.