Interactive Visualization: The Intellectual Lineage Within Sport Marketing Quarterly, 1999 to 2026

This visualization maps the citation network inside Sport Marketing Quarterly from 1999 to 2026: every instance in which one of the 639 articles the journal published during this period cites another. It is one element of a 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. Each article appears as a dot placed by year, colored by topic family, and sized by the number of citations it received from later SMQ articles, and each curve connects a citing article to the earlier article it cites. A companion map follows the references in the other direction, to the intellectual sources beyond the journal.

How to explore the visualization:

• Hover over a dot to view an article’s title, authors, year, and topic, together with a sample of the articles it cites and the later articles that cite it.
• Click a dot to bring its full citation lineage into focus. Every article it cites and every article that cites it 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 isolate it, or click a period header to show only the citations made by articles from that period.
• Refine the view with the filter switches, the search box for author surnames and title words, and the size key, where clicking a circle sets a minimum citation count. 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 changed when the industry did.

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