Interactive Visualization: Tracing the Intellectual Lineage of Sport Marketing Quarterly, 1999 to 2026
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Every journal carries an internal conversation: later articles cite earlier ones, certain works become anchors for a line of inquiry, and topics gain or lose momentum as researchers build on what came before. This visualization makes that conversation visible for Sport Marketing Quarterly. It comes from a project that maps the journal’s published record from 1999 to 2026, both the subjects its articles have addressed and the ways those articles draw on one another. The manuscript is in preparation, and the full analysis will follow after publication. Presented here is one element of that work: the journal’s own citation network, which shows where later research has built on earlier contributions and which articles have shaped the field’s development.
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 visualization is designed for a desktop screen. Open it in a new tab for the full-size view.