The Elephant in the Room: Visualizing the Latent Communication Space in European Union Studies

European Union studies is known as a fragmented and interdisciplinary field. Drawing on bibliometric methods, this article present a novel approach to examine the alleged lines of fragmentation in EU studies. It maps the network structure arising from the communication practices in journals concerned with EU studies by analyzing 2,561 articles, containing 66,162 references, published in four authoritative EU journals in the period 2003-2010. It finds a complex network of EU and non-EU sources clustering around different bordering disciplines; particularly Political Science, Comparative Politics, International Relations and Public Administration. Its sub-networks can be delimited according to these disciplines, but also geographical and methodological lines. The paper concludes that: 1) the days when International Relations dominated the field are gone; 2) a transatlantic divide in communication practices of EU scholars can be observed in the network 3) and this is somewhat related to a methodological cleavage in the field.