Studying Climate Policy and Governance: Mapping Citations

I have recently been thinking about network analysis and visualization as a research analysis tool. One of the ideas I have been considering is mapping citations within individual journals when reviewing the academic literature.

To explore this possibility, I took a relatively small sample of thirty eight articles, which came from the Climate Change Policy and Governance topic in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change (WIREs Climate Change). I limited the analysis to articles that a) are included in the Scopus database and b) have their references listed there. 

These articles had a total of 2,364 references. Of these, 106 were cited by at least two of the WIREs Climate Change articles. I used this data, Gephi, and the SciencesPo MediaLab's Table2Net tool to create a network visualization which connects two WiREs articles if they cite at least one source in common.

In the following network visualizations, article 1 and article 2 are connected if they share at least one reference in common.

The analysis results in the network below, which includes the thirty two articles that share a reference with at least one other article in the sample. The thickness of a connection shows the number of references in common (Branger et al. 2015 and Laing et al. 2014 at the bottom share nine references in common). The size of each circle shows the total number of shared references an article has (the two largest, Munck af Rosenschold et al. 2014 and Gupta 2010, share twenty one references each with other articles).  

Climate Policy and Governance Articles connected by shared references.

In the following two images, I show two ways of categorizing these articles. The first is based on WIREs Climate Change's own sub-topics, which divide the articles according to their focus (e.g., national policy or private governance). As the map shows, these sub-topics are relatively fragmented across the network.

Climate Policy and Governance Articles: Shared references, color coded according to WiRES Climate Change sub-topics.

The second image below organizes the articles into "communities" based on shared references. Most of these communities include articles from a number of WIREs sub-topics (for example, the yellow community includes articles from the multilevel/transnational, national, international, and cities sub-topics).

Climate Policy and Governance Articles: Shared references, color coded according to network "communities" identified by Gephi.

For now, I'm going to leave the analysis at the descriptive level, but I'm planning to come back to these articles in the near future.