Measuring CMOT's intellectual structure and its development

Computational Organization Theory is often described as a multidisciplinary and fast-moving field which can make it difficult to keep track of it. The recent inclusion of Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory (CMOT) into the Social Science Citation Index offers a good reason to take stock of what has happened since the foundation of the journal and to analyze its intellectual structure and development from 1995 to 2008. We identify the most influential publications by means of citation analysis and show that a core of codified knowledge has developed over time. Additionally, we provide empirical support for the characteristics generally ascribed to the journal such as multidisciplinarity. Finally, we depict the main research foci in CMOT’s intellectual structure employing a co-citation analysis of publications and investigate their development over time. Overall, our quantitative review shows CMOT to be thematically focused on organizations, groups and networks while being remarkably diverse in terms of theoretical approaches and methods used.