Mapping the Intellectual Landscape of Leisure and Social Cohesion: A Bibliometric Analysis of Conceptual Evolution, Thematic Trends, Influential Scholarship, and Emerging Research Frontiers in Global Discourse (2000–2025)
Jul 2026· International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure· 0 citations· 67 references
Abstract
Leisure extends beyond recreation and represents a social space shaped by cultural values, economic conditions, spatial arrangements, and institutional structures. Social cohesion reflects the level of trust, connectedness, and shared belonging within communities, and leisure settings often function as social arenas where cohesion can either be strengthened or weakened depending on accessibility, inclusivity, policy support, and cultural relevance. This study presents a bibliometric review of literature on leisure and social cohesion to examine its conceptual development, intellectual structure, and emerging research trends. A total of 20,070 records were retrieved from the WOS for the period 2000–2025, of which 3,933 documents met the inclusion criteria. Using CiteSpace version 6.4.R1, co-citation, co-authorship, institutional, country, and keyword co-occurrence analyses were conducted to map collaboration networks, leading institutions, influential authors, and dominant thematic clusters. The results show a steady increase in publications after 2000, confirming the growing interdisciplinary nature of research linking leisure, tourism, community development, and social capital. Major clusters include COVID-19 pandemic, tourism destinations, social capital, government trust, sharing economy, and community participation. Influential works by Forrest and Kearns (2001), Putnam (2000), Gössling et al. (2020), Friedkin (2004), and Nunkoo (2011) form the intellectual foundation of the field. The United States, England, and China are the most productive countries, while leading institutions include the State University System of Florida, University of Johannesburg, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, University of London, and University of Waterloo. Leisure emerges as a conditional mechanism for social cohesion shaped by structural inequalities and institutional support.
Local media research has long been pulled between two demands: the normative expectation that local journalism sustains democratic life, and the structural reality of a digitally reconfigured media environment in which the conditions for that work are eroding. This study examines how that tension has shaped the development of the field through a bibliometric analysis of 1,088 publications indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) core collection between 1977 and 2024. Drawing on temporal trends, citation patterns, co-authorship networks, and keyword co-occurrences, the analysis traces both the quantitative expansion and the thematic reorientation of the literature. Two turning points stand out: a 1990s shift toward political participation and community engagement, and a post-2012 turn toward digital transformation, platform dependency, and the integration of social media into local news ecosystems. Geographic concentration in the USA, Spain, Australia, and England, alongside the marginal but growing visibility of Latin American and Asian scholarship, indicates that the field’s intellectual map is shaped not only by the substance of local media but by uneven structures of academic visibility. These patterns suggest that local media research has functioned less as a geographically defined subfield than as a theoretical space in which communication scholarship negotiates the tension between journalism’s democratic ideals and the structural pressures of an increasingly platformized media environment. The corpus is limited to publications indexed in the WoS core collection, classified under communication, and retrieved through terms appearing in article titles. Just over half of the corpus (552 of 1,088 records) is indexed in the social sciences citation index and almost two-fifths (420) in the emerging sources citation index, which points to a field that is consolidating but still only partially represented in the most established indexes. The article therefore treats the bibliometric record as a visible, indexed part of local media scholarship rather than the whole field and interprets its development through the relationship between democratic expectations, structural media change, and uneven scholarly visibility.
Murad Karaduman, Muhammet Erdem Duru, M. A. Arık et al.· Online Journal of Communicat...· 0 citations
This study aims to systematically reveal the intellectual structure, collaboration networks, and thematic orientations of the field by examining the New Economic Sociology (NES) literature indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database using bibliometric methods. A search conducted on October 19, 2025, using the keyword ‘new economic sociology’ yielded 238 publications covering the period 1987-2025. Analyses reveal that NES, developed under the influence of founding figures such as Granovetter, Swedberg, and Beckert, has evolved into a multi-layered field of research that examines economic action within social networks, institutions, cultural frameworks, and uncertainty dynamics. This study analysed co-authorship, citation networks, country and institutional contributions, keyword formations, bibliographic matches of documents and authors, and common citation structures using VOSviewer. The findings show that NES has a strong theoretical core and that the themes of embeddedness, network relations, and institutional coordination remain dominant. Sustainable Development Goals analyses reveal that the NES intersects meaningfully with goals such as innovation, economic growth, reducing inequalities, and sustainable cities. This study aims to provide a comprehensive assessment of the current state of the field and future research directions by making the structural characteristics of the NES literature visible.
Özcan Garan· Sosyal Siyaset Konferansları...· 0 citations
Background Research on how young people volunteer and contribute to their communities in digitally shaped contexts has accumulated in parallel strands across education, communication, and youth studies, without an integrated picture. The elasticity of the civic engagement construct compounds this dispersion. This study adopts an explicit boundary: it maps community-benefit engagement, that is, volunteering, service-learning, and civically oriented activity directed at the benefit of others, and excludes political participation by construct definition. Methods The study analysed 310 English-language articles and reviews indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (2006–2026). Records were screened along four axes against the declared construct boundary and refined by a targeted content audit, with LLM-supported abstract reading as structured decision support. Using bibliometrix and VOSviewer, the analysis combined performance analysis with co-word and thematic mapping, co-citation analysis, reference publication year spectroscopy, and citation-genealogy analysis. Results The corpus is recent and dispersed: 310 documents across 251 journals, with little author continuity. Across four complementary views, service-learning emerges as the principal organisational frame. Digital technology is present throughout but does not form a single consolidated pillar; digital terms distribute across civic-development, social-media, inclusion, and service-learning clusters, indicating a cross-cutting, context-dependent role. Volunteering is visible but neither central nor autonomous, and no coherent digital-volunteering theme emerged under the present definition and parameters. The intellectual core rests on two interlinked streams: a civic participation and social capital canon rooted around 2000, and a recent service-learning evaluation literature. Production concentrates in the United States and China; Türkiye contributes five documents, a reading conditioned by the English-language, single-database frame. Conclusions The study gives a dispersed literature an integrated science map under a transparent construct boundary, and converts its thin regions, in volunteering vocabulary, theoretical consolidation, and measurement, into a concrete research agenda.
Hatice Büber-Kaya· Open Research Europe· 0 citations
Housing research, a dynamic and multidisciplinary field within the built environment literature, has developed a substantial theoretical and empirical knowledge base. However, its thematic structure and intellectual evolution remain insufficiently mapped at specific publication venues. Drawing on data from the Web of Science Core Collection, this study presents a bibliometric analysis of 688 housing-related publications in Buildings (MDPI) between 2011 and 2025. Using performance analysis and science mapping techniques, it examines publication growth, country and institution contributions, author productivity, citation patterns, and keyword co-occurrence structures. China leads in productivity, accounting for 27.62% of total output, followed by Spain, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Thematic analyses show that thermal comfort, energy efficiency, and sustainability retain centrality, while social housing and housing affordability increasingly shape the research agenda. Building on prior studies of the journal’s thematic structure, this study provides a focused analysis of housing as a distinct research domain within Buildings, revealing a separate intellectual niche and offering a strategic framework for priorities such as energy performance in social housing and climate-responsive housing strategies.
Esra Orhan Yılmaz, M. Fırat, Ayşegül Durukan· Buildings· 0 citations
Entrepreneurship studies have increasingly shifted from purely economic and individualistic perspectives toward socio-cultural approaches. However, the existing literature remains fragmented regarding the specific relational mechanisms through which cultural embeddedness influences entrepreneurial innovation and resilience within collectivist societies. This study aims to map the intellectual structure, thematic development, and conceptual relationships among cultural embeddedness, entrepreneurship, and rural entrepreneurship using a bibliometric analysis approach. A total of 34 journal articles published between 2017 and 2026 were retrieved from the Dimensions database and analyzed using VOSviewer. The bibliometric mapping reveals four distinct thematic clusters: (1) entrepreneurial actors and social interaction, (2) cultural adaptation and community impact, (3) macro-economic and theoretical dimensions, and (4) contextual business opportunities. Overlay visualization demonstrates a significant shift in entrepreneurship scholarship from macro-institutional and country-level frameworks toward micro-relational dynamics, including community trust, social norms, and collective coping mechanisms. Furthermore, this study identifies disaster resilience as an emerging yet underexplored research frontier within the cultural embeddedness literature. The findings contribute to entrepreneurship scholarship by positioning cultural embeddedness not merely as a contextual variable but as a dynamic socio-cultural mechanism shaping entrepreneurial continuity, adaptation, and resilience. The insights generated provide valuable guidance for advancing rural entrepreneurship and strengthening socially embedded entrepreneurial ecosystems in emerging economies, thereby supporting Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) and SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities).
D. Games, A. Askolani, Titis Shinta Dhewi et al.· Proceedings of the Internati...· 0 citations
Diversity climate refers to shared perceptions of how organizations and educational institutions value, support, and fairly manage differences related to ethnicity, gender, culture, and other social identities. This study aims to map the global development of diversity climate research and synthesize evidence on its roles and outcomes. Using a combined bibliometric and scoping review of 158 Scopus-indexed articles published between 1993 and 2025, publication trends, key themes, and empirical patterns were identified, with 45 studies included in the qualitative synthesis. The results show a strong growth of diversity climate research since the late 2000s, dominated by Western countries but increasingly expanding to other regions. The findings indicate that diversity climate functions as a multilevel mechanism influencing psychological well-being, team cohesion, innovation, employee retention, and students' intercultural development. Overall, diversity climate plays a strategic role in transforming diversity into inclusion, resilience, and performance in culturally diverse institutions.
A. Guspa, Wildan Haru Pradani· Indigenous· 0 citations
