Mapping Balkan – Southeast European studies

ABSTRACT

This article presents an overview that systematically maps the historical development, thematic foci and temporal trends of research in Balkan – Southeast European studies. It uses bibliographic and content analysis as well as other tools to synthesize around 8000 scholarly publications on the Balkans – Southeast Europe that are indexed in the Web of Science databases (SSCI, A&HCI, ESCI, BKCI-SSH). We provide a visual representation of the intellectual historiography and the conceptual content and dynamics of Balkan – Southeast European studies, identifying the most prominent works, the active research themes and the emerging trajectories in the field.

KEYWORDS:

• Balkan studies
• Southeast Europe
• bibliographical analysis
• content analysis
• web of science

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. The author acknowledges the financial support by the University of Graz for the Open Access Publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary materials

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2022.2153400

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Balkans or Southeast(ern) Europe are the most prevalent terms used, yet with no unanimous agreement. In addition to this dominant designation, other terms have been historically used, like Europe Orientale, Europa Balcanica, Balkan peninsula, Oriental Peninsula, South-Slavic Peninsula, Balkan Slavic, Near East, Eastern question, Late Antique Eastern Empire (in classical studies), Turkey-in-Europe or European Turkey (during the Ottoman Empire) or Rumelia (to Ottoman historians), Südosteuropäische Wirtschaftsraum (Southeast European economic space of the Third Reich). Finally, we have the term Southeastern Europe which, during the Cold War, was subsumed under the notion of communist Eastern Europe, then integrated into the European Union. Lately, we have the (not yet integrated) Western Balkans - and many others still. I thank one of the reviewers for suggesting some of the terms. For a comprehensive discussion on the many historical concepts used, see Todorova (2009), 21–37; Mishkova (2019), 7–34. For an overview on the ontological debate of defining the region and the merits and critiques of the various approaches in terms of either geopolitical construct, geographical borders, cultural traits, mental maps, historical structures, economic development, legacies of the past or discourses, see Daskalov (2017), 1–34; Bracewell and Drace-Francis 1999.

2. For earlier criticism, see the works of Wolff (1956), 3–9; Jelavich and Jelavich (1963), vii-xvii; Black (1963), 173–83; and on more recent account, see Todorova (2009); Bieber (2015); Mishkova (2019) among others.

3. Some scholars already have challenged the setting apart of Anatolia and Middle East from the Balkans and in the long-run they argue for a gradual and inevitable expansion of the disciplinary boundaries to ‘Eurasia Minor Studies’ (Vezenkov 2009; Kaser 2015).

4. See, for example, Lewison and Igić (1999), Igić (2002), on studying patterns of co-authorship and scientific productivity in the countries of former Yugoslavia and the influence of the war; Ivanović and Ho (2014) on studying the productivity and influence of Serbian researchers on the scientific community; Kutlača et al. (2015) on studying the volume and the quality of scientific output in different scientific fields in various countries of South East Europe; Pajić (2015) on exploring the main features and effects of the growth in international scientific productivity of the countries of Eastern Europe in the field of social sciences and humanities.

5. For more details about the direct citation analysis and HistCite software, see Garfield (2004), Garfield et al. (2006). For the co-word analysis and VOSviewer software, see Van Eck and Waltman (2010), Van Eck and Waltman (2011) (on the scholar’s criticisms and responses to the use of this method, see Morris and Van Der Veer Martens 2008 with further references). For the temporal analysis and the burst detection algorithm, see Sci2 Team (2009). For a detailed discussion of scientometric mapping approach and techniques pertinent to Human and Social sciences, see also Sooryamoorthy (2021).

6. In addition to the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), we include also the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) providing more regional or speciality area coverage, and the Book Citation Index for Social Sciences & Humanities (BKCI-SSH). Our preliminary direct citation analysis showed that books receive higher local citation scores than the articles do.

7. Scopus or Constellate (JSTOR and Portico) could complement the research, as they contain citation information on a larger set of journals, complete full coverage of journal from volume one, cover more unique titles of different languages and regions, multi- and discipline-specific. Yet, the standardization and merging into one format was not error free, mainly due to the many duplicates to be removed (more than 43%) and the differences used in cited references (journals’ abbreviations, authors’ names etc.). Thus, here we retain only the data until 1956.

8. The general descriptive bibliometric characteristics of the data are presented in Table 2 in the supplementary file.

9. On the criticism about the citation indexes and the logic and application of Scientometrics in general and more specifically to the social sciences and humanities, see, for example; Huang (2018) with further references.

10. In addition to the title, keywords, and abstract are use as text data sources. We only focused the analysis on the titles, since keywords and abstract were not available for all articles in our database.

11. The cited references (CRs) in our data contained variants, especially the references on books. We use the manual cleaning-up procedure, setting the clustering algorithm with a Levenshtein threshold of 0.75. We also manually checked and unified variants of the same cited references (CRs), especially for books that received a local citation of more than 20 or had different years or editions and translations into other languages. After the cleaning, we unify the variants of the same CRs, about 12% of the initial cited references.

12. For a slightly different, more historical event-oriented, periodization of Balkan – Southeast European Studies (before WWI, between the two World Wars, between WWII and 1989, between 1990 and EU enlargement perspective, and (possibly) after EU enlargement perspective), see Fischer (2009).

13. The period between the mid-19th and early 20th century was a time of systematic accumulation of ‘positive’ ‘fragmented’ knowledge, with some ‘best-practice’ pattern and publication ‘sources’ in history, linguistics, ethnography, and archaeology (Mishkova 2012, 41).

14. The highest global and local citation scores were on 1997 (5691, 602) and 1995 (3365, 358), respectively.

15. With reference to the WoS classification of the research areas, our database includes 17% of the articles from History; 12% from Political Science; 10% from Area Studies; 9.6% from Multidisciplinary Humanities, 9.5% Economics; 8% from International Relations; 6% from Archaeology; 6% from Anthropology; 3% from Geography; 3% from Linguistics; 3% from Sociology; 3% from Business; 2.5% from Social Sciences; and Interdisciplinary and the other remaining research areas less than 2% of the total.

16. This research network includes other works not presented here because of the LCS being less than 35 e.g., Kaiser and Voytek (1983, Sedentism and Economic-Change in the Balkan Neolithic), Tringham et al. (1985, The Opovo Project – A Study of Socioeconomic Change in the Balkan Neolithic), Stevanovic (1997, The age of clay: The social dynamics of house destruction) and the more recent studies of Orton (2012, Herding, Settlement, and Chronology in the Balkan Neolithic).

17. On the argument of Archaeology and Anthropology as closely related disciplines, and their largely absent from the Balkan – Southeast European scene until recently, see Franzinetti et al. (2020, 434–5) with further references.

18. I would like to thank one of the reviewers for bringing this point up into the discussion.

19. Normalization for the layout technique was performed choosing the LinLog modularity. Clustering parameter resolution was set to 1.6, the minimum size of clusters produced was set to 1 and the smaller clusters that do not have this minimum size were selected to be merged into larger clusters.

20. The terms ‘western balkan(s) (country)’ altogether have the highest number of occurrences, the total link strength and the average normalized number of citations received, especially after 2014, see Table 3 of the supplement.

21. It has been argued that the notion of the ‘Western Balkans,’ a Brussels construct that came into being after the Vienna European Council in 1998, is discursively a term of exclusion or at least Europe’s periphery, contradicting all European objectives and expectations of the region (Bokova 2002, 32–32; Hayden 2013, xi).

22. For a more exhaustive list of potential alternative databases, including also smaller, field specialized databases, for Social Sciences, see Archambault and Gagné (2004), 5, 61.

Additional information

Funding

The work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 891530. This publication reflects only the author’s view, and the Agency cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Notes on contributors

Dorian Jano

Dorian Jano is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for South-East European Studies, University of Graz. His main research interests focus on issues of democratization and the Europeanization of Southeast Europe.