Faraway, So Close! Co-Citation Analysis of Sources Cited by Gaming & Simulation Journal

This paper examines how Simulation & Gaming, a journal with roots in the simulation and gaming movement of the 1960s and 1970s, connects to other scholarly fields studying games. The authors argue that although games are inherently multidisciplinary, research traditions in Game Studies, Game Design, game-applied computing, and Simulation & Gaming have developed largely in parallel with few crossings, and that mapping these connections could open new avenues for exchange. The stated aim is an exploratory first step toward understanding these relationships.

The study collected all indexed articles from Simulation & Gaming through the Dimensions Database and applied co-citation analysis of cited sources using VOSviewer. The resulting visualization revealed thematic clusters labeled as Politics, Education, Administration, Medicine, and Psychology. The most frequently co-cited journals were Computers & Education, with 303 connections, followed by Computers in Human Behavior (257) and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (252). The authors note that the field's intellectual base is diverse, drawing on many disciplines.

A notable finding is the absence of mainstream Game Studies journals from these clusters, which the authors interpret as evidence of limited direct engagement between the two traditions. The paper situates its analysis within prior bibliometric work on game scholarship, including studies of scholars' disciplinary identities and the most-cited publications in the field, which likewise point to a multidisciplinary but fragmented landscape.

The analysis is limited in scope: it draws on a single journal and a single database, and its findings are presented as preliminary. The authors plan a follow-up comparison of Simulation & Gaming with Game Studies and Games and Culture to identify more precisely where the two bodies of literature intersect or remain separate.