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

Introduction

The study of the Balkans – Southeast Europe¹ has, despite the many debates within and among other disciplines, grown continuously over the past few decades and re-oriented to experience political and socio-cultural changes at the nation-state, the European and more broadly at the Global level. In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, during the inception phase of Balkan – Southeast European studies as a distinct academic field, only a few studied the region as a whole, and for the most part, they have been criticized for being quasi-journalistic or methodologically unsophisticated, culturally-ideologically biased or politically entangled, unequally privileging certain subjects over others, and with a tendency to ignore the larger context of Balkan relations with(in) Europe as a whole.² It was only after the 1990s the Balkan – Southeast European studies grew and incorporated a greater range of fields and started to show the growing significance of interdisciplinary research (Fleming 2000, 1231) and its ‘inevitably’ European future (Njaradi 2012; 186, 198; Jano 2008). Over time, the major scholarly debates on the Balkans – Southeast Europe have shifted towards a more reflexive approach: firstly, by deconstructing the notion of the region as ‘Europe’s Other’ (Todorova 1994, 2009), followed by a more local ‘self-understanding’ from within the region towards its proper ‘self’ and the outside world (Mishkova 2012, 2017, 2019). This has developed into a multidirectional and multivocal reflection of images, ideas, and discourses on ‘Europeanness,’ mirrored to and from the Balkans and Europe alike (Petrović 2014). However, a number of open issues still remain. They are related to the limitations of continuously comparing the area solely with the rest of Europe, the longevity of nationalism as the foremost object of study, the reluctance to take up theoretical and methodological innovations and approaches, and the question of whether and under what (geographical, historical, political, cultural or practical) criteria to further broaden or narrow down the studied area³ (see Reber and Hartmuth 2009, 1 with further references).

Our knowledge about Balkan – Southeast European studies comes extensively from qualitative surveys and observations on the subject. Recently, some bibliometric studies dealing with the scientific output of the countries from the region in specific areas of science have been published.⁴ Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first of its kind with regard to the scope, the timespan covered, and the use of bibliometric and text-mining techniques and tools to quantitatively synthesize and map the intellectual and conceptual structure of the research on the Balkans – Southeast Europe. Through ‘distant reading,’ we covered about 8000 scholarly publications in the field of social sciences and humanities, whose focus is explicitly on the Balkans – Southeast Europe. We aimed to systematically review the history of the field’s development, its thematic foci and temporal research trends. The article also complements previous qualitative surveys and opens up new avenues for further engagement with large-scale bibliographic metadata and the vast array of scientometric methods and tools to advance our knowledge of the intellectual, cognitive and social structure of Balkan – Southeast European studies.

We first describe the research methods and techniques we employ here and elaborate on the data collection procedure and pre-processing. The findings of the bibliographic and content analysis are presented graphically and discussed with reference to the research timeline and historiography and the core thematic clusters and research trajectories over time. As a final remark, we highlight the key assumptions on the state-of-art and call for further bibliometric research on the more than a century-long history of Balkan – Southeast European studies.

Methodology, analytical tools, data, and limitations

A systematic literature review is a complete stand-alone study that involves rigorous, explicit, and reproducible methods to identify, evaluate and synthesize the existing literature (see Booth et al. 2016, 9–21 with further references). One specific way of reviewing the literature in a systematic fashion is known as bibliometric mapping, that is, a meaningful spatial representation of how the intellectual information connects and relates to one another (Small 1999, 799). It aims to determine the cognitive structure of a scientific field and its evolution (Cobo et al. 2011, 3833). In order to build multifaceted, graphic representations of research fields, showing the linkages among them and the themes and actors shaping them, it is advisable to combine citation, co-word and temporal analysis, since direct citation analysis relies only on highly cited publications, whereas co-word analysis can cover all publications available in a database, whilst temporal analysis can capture the development of the field over-time (Archambault and Gagné 2004, 48).

Following this research approach, we aim to synthesize, categorize and map a sizable existing body of scholarly publications on the Balkans – Southeast Europe and graphically present a historic bibliographic and semantic structure of this Area Study. We are particularly interested in exploring how and to what extent scientific research on the Balkans – Southeast Europe has advanced over time. Specifically, we intend to find answers to the questions of what is its historiographic research development and what are the dominant research themes employed in studying the area, and what thematic foci are time-specific.

To empirically elaborate on these questions and uncover the historical development, themes, and trends in Balkan – Southeast European scientific research, we employ both bibliographic and content analyses in a database of publications collected primarily from the Web of Science (WoS). This approach is particularly useful for systematically processing a large number of diverse scientific publications and extracting useful knowledge from the available bibliographical data on the growing literature on Balkan – Southeast European studies. Bibliographic and text-mining methods are being applied increasingly across disciplines to gain meaningful quantitative insights and trace the development, the structural relationship, and the changing foci of scientific knowledge in a particular research field (Sooryamoorthy 2021, 85). Among the different methods and techniques performed in the research mapping process, we employ here: (i) direct citation analysis, using the HistCite software to chronologically map the research historiography of the most prominent publications and showing how research builds on each other; (ii) co-word analysis, using the VOSviewer software to identify a conceptual map of the major thematic topics based on the relational ties and similarities between the most recurrent terms; (iii) and temporal analysis, using Sci2 Tool to explore the variations and map the temporal sequence of emerging and fading research themes over time.⁵

Acknowledging the importance of the data quality and coverage, we decided to rely primarily on the scholarly publications indexed in the well-established Web of Science and supplement this database with additional bibliographic data from Scopus and Constellate (JSTOR and Portico) for earlier missing years, and manually added the most cited works (books or articles) which were relevant to the topic but are either not indexed or missed by the database search. We first enquire into the Web of Science Core Collection (SSCI, A&HCI, ESCI, BKCI-SSH)⁶ for the terms ‘Balkan’ or ‘Southeast Europe’ within the titles, abstracts or keywords of all publications covered until 2021 from either the Social Sciences or Humanities (broadly defined). A total of 7888 publications were found, with the earliest published in 1957. Of them, only 943 results were books, with the earliest dating back to 2003. To complement our database with entries before 1957, we search the Constellate and Scopus databases, finding and adding a further 445 articles. Although they were missing citation information, we consider them necessary for performing the content analysis.⁷ We also ran a preliminary analysis and looked for the most cited references to manually add the books and articles directly related to the Balkans – Southeast European studies and whose internal record citations were greater than 10. These resulted in 59 new entries (9 articles and 50 books). Our final dataset includes 8378 unique records, of which 4378 are single-authored publications.⁸ Nevertheless, even this choice has its limitations, and potential bias might still exist. Firstly, the dataset is not exhausted, and related records may have been omitted. Important specialized journals in the field are missing, or when present, they do not have complete coverage. Secondly, the dataset is populated mainly by articles than books, and it leans heavily on the most recent research rather than historical publications. Thirdly, the English language dominates compared to other underrepresented languages, especially those from the region.⁹

The analysis is done at an article level. The references cited and the text data from the database are used as sources for the bibliographic and content analysis, respectively. We use the cited references from each publication in our dataset (about 249,000 citations) to identify the most important publications in the field and to build the historiographic map. The corpus of words extracted from the titles is used to best represent the core ideas of an article and thus to identify the thematic maps of the field.¹⁰ Given that databases have problems with the completeness of references and linkages (Van Eck and Waltman 2017), we used CRExplorer to clean the data and reduce the problems posed by variants in the same cited references (Thor et al. 2016).¹¹ The texts of the titles were also pre-processed and normalized with Sci2 tool accordingly. Then, we perform the co-word and temporal analysis and build the thematic clusters (i.e., the more times the words appear together, the stronger the thematic connection) and their temporality (i.e., the sudden increase or decrease rate in the usage frequency of words over time).

Timeline and historiographic map of Balkan – Southeast European studies: a bibliographical analysis

In this section, we present and discuss the information extracted from the bibliographical analysis using HistCite software. Figure 1 sketches the timeline, and Figure 2 maps the research historiography of Balkan – Southeast European studies during 1854–2021.

Figure 1. Timeline of scientific publications in Balkan – Southeast European Studies and the local citation scores (1854–2021).

Note: Figure 1 reports the annual distribution of publications (bars) and the yearly local citation scores within our dataset (continuous line) as % of the total.

Figure 2. A Historiographic mapping of some of the most prominent publications in Balkan – Southeast European studies (1854–2021).

Note: The vertical axis represents time, and the horizontal axis shows the citation network. Each publication receiving more than 35 local citations is presented here by a node (the size of the nodes represents the number of local citation score) with its respective bibliographic data (the author, the year and the title of publication). In the brackets, we report the local citation score. The lines connecting them indicate a direct citation. Please note that for reasons of visual clarity, the map here lists chronologically and links only a few of the most cited publications within our database, unfortunately leaving many other prominent publications visually unaccented. It should be highlighted that in the most cited works, there are other seminal conceptual and theoretical works, – e.g., Said, 1978, Orientalism (1.9%); Anderson, 1983, Imagined Communities (1.9%); Wolff, 1994 Inventing Eastern Europe (1.6%); Schimmelfennig, 2005, The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe (1.1%); Gellner, 1983, Nations and Nationalism (1%); Vachudova, 2005, Europe Undivided (0.9%), – where scholars of Balkan – Southeast Europe had built on their conceptual frameworks, theoretical models and analyses.

As shown in Figure 1, research on Balkan – Southeast European studies has been growing exponentially over recent decades, with three major breakthroughs in the number of published articles.¹² Until the first half of the 20^th century, during the ‘inception phase,’ there were only a few sporadic articles published.¹³ This is also because, until the 1960s, few studied the region as a whole (Jelavich and Jelavich 1963, xiii). It was only after the mid-1970s, during the ‘institutionalization phase,’ that the number of academic publications on the Balkans – Southeast Europe really kicked off. This happened mainly due to the immense institutionalization of the Balkan – Southeast European studies both inside and outside the region, within (or as a subfield of) broader East European area studies (see Mishkova 2019, 139–210). The post-1989 period, marked by the end of communism and the wars in former Yugoslavia, came with an increase in publications (especially after the mid-1990s) and the return of the Balkans as a separate object of study (Hatzopoulos 2003, 26) and as a Sonderweg and European otherness (Promitzer et al. 2015; 5; Mishkova 2019, 211). During the ‘Balkan’s return’ phase (between 1993 and 2004), the yearly global and local citation scores are much higher than those of any previous period.¹⁴ An indication of the highest attention and acknowledgement received within the academic community. After the mid-2000s, studies on the Balkans – Southeast Europe gained new momentum: a veritable boom of publications, counting for more than 80% of the total publications in our database. This ‘new frontiers phase’ had been accompanied by a ‘transnational and transdisciplinary turn’ in Balkan – Southeast European Studies, reflecting the prospects of progressive European integration as well as the general tendencies of shifting away from area studies towards the burgeoning fields of transnational global studies (Daskalov 2017, 34–43; Mishkova 2019, 224), supranational European studies (Petsinis 2010, 316) and transdisciplinary studies (Fischer 2009; Njaradi 2012, 187).

Figure 2 presents the results of the research on the historiographic mapping of Balkan – Southeast European studies, chronologically listing the fifty-eight most influential publications (nodes) and the direct linkages (more than two hundred sixty links) developed among them over the years. Looking at the historiographic map, the first thing to be noticed is the very dense centric shape of the historiography, with many lines coming or going into them and only a few unconnected publications. These suggest that Balkan – Southeast European studies are compact and early studies still provide an important basis for reference. The core research, developed during the ‘Balkan’s return phase,’ has framed the field and deals with the historical development of the notion and geography of the area, with the most authoritative publications being those of Todorova (1997, Imagining the Balkans; Todorova 1994); Bakić-Hayden (1995, Nesting Orientalisms); Bakić-Hayden and Hayden (1992, Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’); Goldsworthy (1998, Inventing Ruritania); Fleming (2000), Bjelić and Savić eds. (2002, Balkan as Metaphor). Most of the core publications of Balkan – Southeast European area studies are also of a historical nature. These include, amongst others, the earlier works of Cvijić (1918, Peninsule Balkanique); Stavrianos (1958, Balkans since 1453); Jelavich (1983, History of the Balkans Vols 1&2) and the latest historical works of Mazower (2002, Balkans: A short history). Some more historical writing related to the Ottoman period (Inalcik H, 1973, Ottoman Empire: the Classical Age; Shaw SJ, 1977, History of the Ottoman Empire; Sugar PF, 1977, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman rule; Karpat KH, 1985, Ottoman Population), the economic aspects (Stoianovich T, 1960, Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant; Lampe JR, 1982, Balkan Economic History; Palairet MR, 1997, Balkan Economies), linguistic issues (Sandfeld K, 1930, Linguistique balkanique) and religion (Hasluck FW, 1929, Christianity and Islam Under the Sultans), conflicts and wars (McCarthy J, 1995, Death and Exile; Hall RC, 2000, Balkan Wars) and the national question and state formation (Jelavich C and Jelavich B, 1977, Establishment of the Balkan National States; Skendi S, 1967, Albanian National Awakening; Banac I, 1984, National Question in Yugoslavia; Ramet SP, 1992, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia). Throughout the 1990s, numerous things were written about the region’s more recent history, focusing mainly on Yugoslavia’s collapse and its subsequent wars (Donia RJ and Fine JVA, 1994, Bosnia and Hercegovina A Tradition Betrayed; Woodward SL, 1995, Balkan Tragedy; Ramet SP, 1996, Balkan Babel; Lampe JR, 1996, Yugoslavia as History; Karakasidou AN, 1997, Fields of Wheat; Gagnon VP, 2004, The Myth of Ethnic War). Other important references, often roundly criticized, are the personal chronicles of travellers, journalists, and diplomats writing histories of the region. Some very early works include Brailsford HN’s (1906) Macedonia: Its Races and their Future, and West R’s (1941) Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, while the latter, relatively divulgate books on the wars and conflicts are Kaplan RD’s (1993) Balkan Ghosts, Malcolm N’s (1994) Bosnia a Short History, Owen D’s (1995) Balkan Odyssey, Glenny M’s (1996) Fall of Yugoslavia, Holbrooke R’s (1998) To End a War, Malcolm N’s (1998) Kosovo a Short History, Glenny M’s (1999) Balkans Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, and Judah T’s (2000) Kosovo War and Revenge.

The historiographical mapping of Balkan – Southeast European studies is dominated mainly by historians. This is rather unsurprising since the uneven development of scholarly research across the different subjects and research areas has been noticed since the inception stage (see, for example, Jelavich and Jelavich 1963, viii).¹⁵ Nevertheless, there are still a few other developments and departures into new research directions. The most noted emerging research network comes from the discipline of Political Science, especially after 2007, during a more active research period of a nearly doubled overall number of publications. The works of Anastasakis (2008, The EU’s Political Conditionality in the Western Balkans), Noutcheva (2009, Fake, Partial and Imposed Compliance; 2012, European Foreign Policy and the Challenges of Balkan Accession), Freyburg and Richter (2010, National Identity Matters), Bieber (2011, Building Impossible States), Elbasani ed. (2013, European Integration), Vachudova (2014, EU Leverage and National Interests in the Balkans), together with some other important publications, form the latest structural trend in the Balkan – Southeast European studies. The focus here is primarily on the region’s European integration, dealing with EU enlargement conditionality and its (limited) impact. The other important, not connected publications on the map – Chapman JC’s (1981) Vinca Culture of South-East Europe and Perles C’s (2001) Early Neolithic in Greece – belong to the stand-alone Anthropology – Archaeology network.¹⁶ At the intersection of the two disciplines, ‘slighted’ in the study of the region,¹⁷ lies the classical antiquity and human pre-history research, studying the ancient settlements, migrations, socio-economic patterns and changes in the ‘geographical space’ of the contemporary Balkans. Although this stream of scholarship remains unrelated to the Balkan – Southeast European studies, there is clear relevance, and Balkanologists would benefit from the conceptualization of ancient populations and the identifying indicators and methods used to understand the interactions and movements of various populations through these spaces.¹⁸

Thematic foci and their temporality in the Balkan – Southeast European Studies: a content analysis

Using the VOSviewer for the co-word analysis of the collected titles, we have identified and presented the clusters of associated terms in Table 1 and Figure 3, which are grouped into eleven major thematic research foci. We chose only the words occurring more than 20 times, and we considered 60% of the words with the highest relevance score. These words are represented as nodes in the thematic cluster map. The size of the nodes represents the frequency with which the word appears, and the lines between them (links) show the strength of the relationship between the words (nodes). The network created with the below parameters¹⁹ has 98 nodes and 1209 links, grouped into 11 clusters.

Figure 3. Map of Thematic Clusters in Balkan – Southeast European studies (1854–2021). Note: This dynamic file can be web-started at https://app.vosviewer.com/?json=https%3A%2F%2Fdrive.google.com%2Fuc%3Fid%3D16F-uAW2ZY03s6f17CW-kZXSwxJK968qt.

Table 1. Labelling and List of Words for the Core Eleven Thematic Clusters.

Label	Cluster number & colour	Number of words	Words in the cluster are presented in order of their highest occurrence score
Historic Developments	1 – Red	17	CENTURY, AGE, 19TH CENTURY, WORK, BALKAN PENINSULA, OTTOMAN EMPIRE, SOURCE, LIFE, END, BALKAN STATE, CENTRAL EUROPE, CONTRIBUTION, BEGINNING, FIRST WORLD WAR, IDEA, 20TH CENTURY, BULGARIAN
Economic Growth & European Integration	2 – Green	12	COUNTRY, EVIDENCE, IMPACT, EFFECT, WESTERN BALKAN COUNTRY, DETERMINANT, TRADE, BALKAN COUNTRY, FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT, ECONOMIC GROWTH, BALKAN REGION, EUROPEAN INTEGRATION
Balkanism Discourse	3 – Blue	12	LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, EMPIRE, TRADITION, VIEW, CONSTRUCTION, ANATOLIA, NATIONAL IDENTITY, PLACE, BALKANISM, IMPORTANCE, ALBANIAN
Balkan route Migrant & Refugee	4 – Yellow	10	CITY, BORDER, REPRESENTATION, MIGRANT, HUNGARY, REFUGEE, BELGRADE, COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS, DIFFERENCE, BALKAN ROUTE
Balkanization & Balkan War	5 – Purple	10	BALKAN WAR, IDENTITY, NATIONALISM, QUESTION, ORIGIN, BALKANIZATION, REFLECTION, ISLAM, RELIGION, WORLD WAR I
War	6 – Turquoise	9	WAR, WORLD, MEMORY, PEACE, IMAGE, FORMER YUGOSLAVIA, GERMANY, ITALY, RISE
Security	7 – Orange	8	CHALLENGE, SECURITY, PAST, FUTURE, NATO, WESTERN BALKANS, OPPORTUNITY, LIMIT
Country Case Studies	8 – Brown		BOSNIA, CROATIA, MACEDONIA, HERZEGOVINA, REPUBLIC, SLOVENIA
Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe	9 – Rose	5	SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE, SOUTH EASTERN EUROPE, CENTRAL, EASTERN EUROPE, EASTERN
Europeanization	10 – Cherry	5	WESTERN BALKAN, EUROPEAN UNION, INTRODUCTION, EUROPEANIZATION, EU ENLARGEMENT
Gender	11 – Light Green	4	MONTENEGRO, WOMAN, GENDER, BOSNIA HERZEGOVINA

Note: The labelling of the thematic clusters was done after the most prominent words (indicated by a higher weight of occurrence) or/and the multitude of all semantically related words in the specific cluster.

The first, most elaborated theme (cluster 1), which includes the highest number of words, deals with the historical development of the Balkan peninsula throughout the centuries and since the Ottoman Empire. Another intrinsic, analytical element is the discourse on Balkanism (cluster 3), which constitutes a considerable part of the literature. It overlaps somewhat with the themes of Balkanization and the Balkan War (cluster 5). The term ‘war’ is the first most interlinked term and the second most occurring term in Balkan – Southeast European studies, making another more general thematic cluster (cluster 6) focusing on war, memories and peace. The security theme (cluster 7) considers past security concerns, the current challenges and opportunities, and the Western Balkans’ (prospective) NATO membership. Another thematic focus, where scholars have been widely engaged, is Economic Growth (cluster 2), mainly dealing with issues of trade, foreign direct investments, and the general economic impact of the European integration process on the Balkan region. The literature on the ‘Balkan route’ used by migrants and refugees forms a cluster of its own (cluster 4). The literature on the Balkans – Southeast Europe also comprises many case studies from the countries of the region (cluster 8), e.g., Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia, and the broader area studies of the Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe (cluster 9). The theme of Europeanization (cluster 10) constitutes another important strand of literature and deals with the integration process of the region into the political and economic structures of the EU and the impact this has. Gender issues (cluster 11), although comparatively small in number, are yet another distinct thematic focus.

Methodologically, discourse analysis has been the primary methodological approach to the Balkanism discourse (cluster 3). Comparative analysis has been employed to study migration issues (cluster 4), whereas the focal approach to the economic research strand (Cluster 2) has been mainly to provide empirical evidence. The term ‘Balkans’ is used both as a political (cluster 1 and 2, e.g., region, country, state) and a geographical space (cluster 1, e.g., Balkan peninsula) and conceptually, it has negative connotations (e.g., war cluster 5). The more neutral term of South Eastern Europe is used in studies of Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe (cluster 9). The new notion of the ‘Western Balkans’ (cluster 2, 7, 10) has also been used extensively lately,²⁰ and it is intrinsically connected with the process of Europeanization, that is, the integration into the political and economic structures of the EU and the military structures of NATO (see also Petrović 2014, 4).²¹

We also ran a burst detection analysis and presented the results in a temporal bar graph (Figure 4). 80 words have been identified as having a high intensity of usage in the titles over a finite duration of time periods that designate the thematic evolution of Balkan – Southeast European research. The most popular (greatest weight) and long-lasting (longest length in time) word is the term ‘Balkan.’ It has been used extensively – since the inception phase – for 140 consecutive years. Interchangeably, the terms ‘Southeast(ern)’ Europe have also seen extensive usage (1959–1998), albeit with lesser intensity. The term ‘Central’ (1944–1991) refers to either the central Balkans or has been used in studies comparing or integrating the region into a broader space of Central and Eastern Europe (1923–1931).

Figure 4. Temporal Bar Graph for Frequent Burst Words in the Titles of the Balkan – Southeast European studies (1853–2021).

Note: The graph presents the burst-words in the titles of our dataset, their intensity of usage (weight) and the duration of remaining dominant (length). The area of the horizontal bars proportionally represents how many articles paid attention to those words in the title (the weight is expressed by the thickness of each line) and for how long (the length of each line is expressed in years).

In the inception and institutionalization phases (taking place in the lead-up to the 1990s), the subject ‘people’ dominated the field rather than interest in the region as space. The literature dealt mostly with the military, political and economic ‘problems’ of the 19^th century (e.g., the Eastern crisis of 1875–1878, the Balkans’ ‘war[s]’, ‘campaigns’, and peace ‘conference’). It also deals with the ‘Austrians’ and ‘Germans’ and their role in the region and its study, the Balkan ‘federation’ movement, and the post-war policies of the ‘Soviet’ Union and Great ‘Britain’ in the Balkans. During the institutionalization phase, ‘Yugoslavia’ and ‘Romanian’ were referred to most. In addition to the economic crisis of the 1970s, (18^th century) ‘French’ and ‘enlightenment’ influences emerged as research topics of interest. The early scholarly articles were written in the form of ‘reports’ and ‘contributions’ to the ‘study’ of the region.

During the Balkan’s return phase (1993–2004), two main research developments can be observed. In the 1990s, ‘war’ and ‘ethnic’ ‘conflict’ were the focus of research, with particular emphasis on ‘Kosovo’ and ‘NATO’ intervention. In the first decade of the 21^st century, state-‘building’, ‘stability’, and European ‘Union’ ‘enlargement’ dominated the literature.

During the new frontiers phase (especially after 2005), the number of burst-words increased while their period of usage shortened. Yet, the distribution of burst-weights still remains high compared with those of the previous phases. The results indicate that, differently from the previous decades of war/conflict (the 1990s) and European integration (the 2000s), the research topics have now broadened and new directions have emerged (see also Fischer 2009, 2). It can be seen from Figure 4 that the foci of recent research have shifted to deal with different rapidly growing priorities, with the diversification of various issues being discussed: from ‘human’ rights and security issues (‘terrorism’ and ‘organized’ ‘crime’) to the ‘environment’, the ‘migrants’ and ‘refugee’ crises along the Balkan ‘route,’ to the cultural and genetic ‘heritage’ of tracing ‘Neolithic’ communities and residues (‘pottery,’ ‘archaeology’). It has also branched out to incorporate the ‘market’ economy, ‘foreign’ ‘direct’ ‘investment,’ and ‘growth’ to ‘media’ and ‘social’ aspects.

Concluding remarks and further discussions

This article is an initial endeavour to systematically review and visually synthesize the main aspects of the intellectual and conceptual scientific structure of Balkan – Southeast European studies over the last century. It identifies and graphically maps some of the most significant developments in the historiography of the research (in terms of citation relations), the major areas of thematic research, and their trajectories over time, with reference to terms co-occurring or ‘bursting out’ during certain time periods.

The exponentially growing rate of academic publications, their scholarly impact, and the rapid diversification of research topics all indicate that research on the Balkans – Southeast Europe has matured and is now entering a new phase of rapid growth and diverse research avenues. The 21^st century saw research gather new momentum, with a significant turn in Balkan – Southeast European studies, not just in terms of publication outputs and impact, but primarily through diversification in thematic coverage and enriching its (inter)disciplinarity and methodological pluralism. In the first decade of this century, there has been a thematic shift, firstly towards Europeanization, and the decade after, other research trends emerged, such as human rights, economic growth, migrants’ Balkan route, environment, heritage, archaeology, social issues, media and culture, and more, which constitute an important future research inquiry. The uneven development of scholarly research in the different disciplines has been narrowed, and tendencies are changing towards an interdisciplinary and even multidisciplinary endeavour.

However, lingering drawbacks still persist, and the most controversial issues are becoming even more elusive as new concepts, methodological approaches, and theoretical frameworks keep adding to the growing research in Balkan – Southeast European studies. The Balkans – Southeast Europe has often been studied within or compared to Central and Eastern Europe and is only lately being oriented towards the wider European contexts. The conceptual space of the area continues to be somewhat diverse, depending on the discipline and the method of analysis. For example, most studies from the field of economics consider the area as merely a label-term for the related countries under study. Moreover, the ‘Western Balkans’ has recently gained a wider academic usage as an ‘analytical – ad hoc’ concept. Although this political-institutional categorization is destined to ‘disappear’ once, or if, the remaining candidate countries in the Western Balkans are accepted into the EU (Kolstø 2016, 1261). Such recent approaches of a ‘praxeological turn’ in the naming of the area do not commit to an ontological definition of the region, and they are characterized by open and flexible territorial boundaries that can be re-drawn over and again depending on specific research purposes (Blažević 2009; 2; Daskalov 2017, 43). Yet, we should be cautious because any practical or conventional delimitation of the study area can influence the conclusions of the research (Vezenkov 2009, 8). On the issue of a particular prolonged object of study, there is a clearly identifiable central research agenda that focuses (often also critically) on the traditional concepts of Balkanization and Balkanism discourse and the related issues of Balkan wars and conflict, which dominated the field until the 20^th century. Nationalism, entangled with political conflicts and wars, has become an integral part of Balkan – Southeast European Studies. Instead of abandoning it, it could be resituated in a larger comparative and transnational context, engaging critically with theoretical and interdisciplinary explorations in the more contemporary forms and issues (see Kitromilides 1989; Hatzopoulos 2003; Hajdarpašić 2009).

Lastly, the development of comparative Balkan – Southeast European studies has been advancing over recent decades due to the continuous debates and the contributions of scholars worldwide. We should systemically evaluate these contributions and further sharpen the forthcoming research agenda.

This study is by no means an exhaustive review of the existing research in Balkan – Southeast European studies. It is rather a ‘snapshot’ taken at one point using certain analytical tools and data available. The literature is vast and dynamic, evolving with time, and as we progress, new analytical technics and more research data will become available. What we hope to do with this research is to open a new debate and advocate future research towards a more systematic review of the exponential growth of research in Balkan – Southeast European studies. The next step would be for other studies to draw on this pioneering effort and develop improved mapping, using data sources that are likely to catch more of the relevant literature. There will be a need for further studies to reassess, compare and update the approach with corrections or inputs. Future research should explore and employ data from various different resources (e.g., Scopus, Google Scholar, Perseus, CEEOL, among others)²² or collect information from a different point in time or even combine it. Further study should also make use of different analytical tools and software (e.g., CiteSpace, Biblioshiny, ScientoPy, CitNetExplorer, and Sticci, among others) and extend to bibliographic coupling or co-citation analysis to understand the specialities within the area study, and how they relate to each other. The analysis could be enriched with thematic analyses, also with authors’ keywords, the abstract or even the full text. We need to build connections among multiple ideas (qualitative review surveys included) and combine the pieces of information contained in various ‘maps’ in order to obtain a rich and meaningful representation of the intellectual structure, conceptual content and dynamics of the Balkan – Southeast European research field.

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.

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.

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.