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Constructing the Field of Philanthropic and Nonprofit Studies: Evidence from Citation Networks

Jin Ai, Richard S. Steinberg, Chao Guo, Filipi Nascimento Silva

arXiv:2609.03291v1cs.SIcs.DL

TL;DR

PNPS has grown rapidly, but fragmented concepts and publication practices leave its intellectual structure only partially visible. The study maps a broad Web of Science corpus using combined retrieval, citation-network analysis, NLP, and LLM-assisted labeling, finding three weakly connected power centers and a disciplinary footprint extending into biomedicine and technology.

  • Problem

    Fragmented concepts, vocabularies, journals, and citation practices make PNPS boundaries and intellectual connections difficult to assess.

  • Method

    The study combines journal- and keyword-based retrieval with article-level citation-network analysis, NLP, LLM-assisted cluster labeling, and structural comparisons.

  • Results

    PNPS is a loosely connected field dominated by nonprofit organizations, social movements, and voluntary action, with scholarship extending into biomedicine and technology and mainstream journals representing only part of the ecosystem.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    The mapping provides a nomenclature system for situating research, identifying gaps, and recognizing emerging directions in PNPS.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    The search omitted keywords related to member-benefit nonprofits, constraining the representation of self-help and mutual-aid research.

Abstract

from arXiv · show

Philanthropic and nonprofit studies (PNPS) has grown rapidly as an interdisciplinary field, yet its intellectual structure and boundaries remain only partially visible. This study maps the field by combining journal- and keyword-based retrieval with citation network analysis, natural language processing, and large language model-assisted cluster labeling. Using 60,917 Web of Science articles, we identify major topical communities, examine their structural connections, and assess how well mainstream PNPS journals represent the broader landscape of related scholarship. The results show that PNPS is a loosely connected field dominated by three distinct "power centers": nonprofit organizations, social movements, and voluntary action. The analysis also reveals a broader disciplinary footprint than commonly recognized, extending beyond the social sciences and humanities into areas such as biomedicine and technology. These findings clarify the organization of PNPS and highlight opportunities for stronger integration across research domains.

INTRODUCTION

PNPS has expanded as an interdisciplinary field, but fragmented vocabularies, journals, and citation practices make its boundaries and intellectual connections difficult to see. This study addresses that problem by mapping a broad citation-connected corpus and finds three weakly connected power centers alongside a wider disciplinary footprint.

  • Fragmented vocabularies, journals, and citation practices limit intellectual cross-fertilization and make emerging research areas harder to integrate.
  • Existing mappings use journal lists or curated keywords, producing complementary but differently bounded views of what is central or peripheral.
  • The study combines journal- and keyword-based retrieval with citation networks, NLP, and LLM-assisted cluster labeling.The approach also compares mainstream PNPS journals with the broader research landscape.
  • PNPS is dominated by three weakly connected power centers: nonprofit organizations, social movements, and voluntary action.
  • The field extends beyond the social sciences and humanities into areas including biomedicine and technology.
  • Key Concepts and Conceptual Variation: Conceptual diversity enriches PNPS but disperses related scholarship across disciplinary traditions and publication venues.Mapping therefore requires attention to how these strands are organized and connected.

Knowledge Development and Prior Mapping Efforts

Prior PNPS mappings document growth, thematic communities, multidisciplinary engagement, and institutional consolidation, but their retrieval and network designs produce partial views of the field. This study broadens the sample and models article-level citation relationships to connect core and adjacent scholarship.

  • Earlier mapping efforts generally relied on journal-based or keyword-based retrieval, yielding partially overlapping portraits of PNPS.
  • Journal-based studies identified topical communities and increasing cohesion within core PNPS journals, while remaining limited in geographic and cultural diversity.
  • PNPS scholars publish across a wider range of disciplinary journals than mainstream outlets alone, but prior work did not examine citation relationships among those dispersed publications.
  • Keyword-based reviews reveal multidisciplinary engagement and unbalanced citation flows between flagship PNPS journals and external outlets.
  • Earlier keyword and journal filters may underrepresent funding, giving, hybrid organizations, and four WoS disciplinary domains outside the social sciences.
  • This study includes more than 60,000 WoS articles and builds an article-level unified citation network spanning core and adjacent fields.

DATA AND METHODOLOGY

The study uses the WOS-CORE-ESCI 2023 snapshot to obtain authoritative, broad coverage of peer-reviewed journals and established non-peer-reviewed sources across the social and natural sciences.

  • The dataset comes from the WOS-CORE-ESCI 2023 snapshot, selected for authority, comprehensive coverage, and topical classification.
  • WoS Core and ESCI cover peer-reviewed journals and established non-peer-reviewed sources across the social and natural sciences while excluding outlets that fail editorial quality standards.
  • Each journal is assigned to at least one of five broad disciplinary domains and at least one of 254 cross-disciplinary subject categories.

Data Sampling

The sampling and analysis pipeline combines curated journal and keyword retrieval with article-level citation networks, cluster characterization, LLM labeling, and structural, temporal, and venue comparisons.

  • Data Sampling: The sample begins with articles from 19 PNPS journals and adds articles published elsewhere through a curated keyword list.
  • Data Sampling: Keyword validation used relevance screening, three-author assessment, and Gwet’s AC1, with an average agreement score of 0.93.
  • Data Sampling: The article-level reliability check found an average relevance rate of 94.3% across repeated samples.
  • Analysis Strategy: Citation-network nodes represent articles and edges represent citation relationships, enabling topical cluster detection from patterns of scholarly connection.
  • Analysis Strategy: Cluster-specific terms are ranked using relative within- versus outside-cluster frequency, with out-cluster frequency weighted more heavily to reduce generic tokens.
  • Analysis Strategy: An LLM generates concise cluster titles and descriptions from distinctive terms and central article titles.
  • Analysis Strategy: The disparity-filter backbone preserves structurally important cluster ties, while normalized mutual citation links compare connection strength across all cluster pairs.
  • Analysis Strategy: The analysis tracks cluster publication shares over time and compares core-journal distributions with broader PNPS-oriented venues and the full corpus.

RESULTS

The study evaluates PNPS through publication growth, citation impact, disciplinary composition, topical communities, temporal development, and the relationship between mainstream journals and the broader corpus.

  • The analysis describes publication growth and citation impact in the retrieved PNPS corpus.
  • The study assesses the multidisciplinary footprint of PNPS through the domain composition of its literature.
  • The study maps major topical communities and examines their relationships within the intellectual landscape.
  • The analysis compares mainstream PNPS journals with the full corpus to assess how well core journals represent the field.

Growth in Publication and Scholarly Impact

The retrieved corpus contains 60,917 articles and shows sustained publication growth after 1960, while PNPS spans social sciences alongside biomedical, technological, and physical-science domains. Citation-network analysis further identifies a connected component and 20 topical communities.

  • 60,917 articles with 520,963 references were identified in Web of Science from 1899 to 2023.
  • Publication remained sparse until the mid-twentieth century, followed by sustained growth after 1960.
  • Social Sciences dominate the corpus, which also includes substantial Life Sciences & Biomedicine representation and smaller Technology and Physical Sciences shares.
  • The Leiden algorithm identifies 20 clusters representing distinct topical communities.

Cluster 1: Nonprofit Organizations and the Nonprofit Sector

Cluster 1 centers on nonprofit organizations and the nonprofit sector, linking organizational structures and practices with sector-level partnerships, accountability, and evolution. The wider cluster map also spans cooperation, civic engagement, charitable giving, and multiple disciplinary domains.

  • Cluster 1 examines nonprofit organizations and the nonprofit sector as a whole.
  • At the organizational level, the cluster covers structures, governance, interactions, financial sustainability, and service delivery.
  • At the sector level, it addresses government and nongovernment partnerships, accountability, and sectoral evolution.
  • Related topical communities: Other highlighted communities examine prosocial development, civic engagement and volunteerism, social entrepreneurship, charitable contributions, and group cooperation.
  • Disciplinary composition: Social Sciences dominate most clusters, while Life Sciences and Biomedicine, Technology, Arts and Humanities, and Physical Sciences are prominent in selected clusters.

Structural Organization and Intellectual Dynamics of the Field

The citation network is used to reveal connections among PNPS topical areas, track their temporal development, compare publication venues, and identify weakly integrated areas.

  • Citation-network analysis examines how the field’s topical areas are connected.
  • The analysis traces cluster relations and the temporal development of research areas.
  • The study compares topic representation across publication venues while highlighting areas that remain weakly integrated.

Core Structure of the Field

The cluster-level backbone reveals a hub-connector-periphery structure rather than a single intellectual core. PNPS is organized around three spheres of influence: nonprofit organizations, social movements, and voluntary action.

  • The backbone uses retained citation ties to show a hub-connector-periphery configuration, with tie thickness indicating citation weight and node size indicating cluster article counts.The representation preserves important structural features after backbone filtering.
  • Clusters 6 and 7 jointly function as central hubs, with Cluster 6 coordinating major connections and Cluster 7 occupying a strategic bridging position.Cluster 6 connects directly to multiple major clusters, while Cluster 7 links Cluster 6 to additional clusters.
  • Clusters 1, 2, 5, 8, 11, 13, 15, and 18 are peripheral because they have relatively few significant ties to the broader network.Clusters 11 and 15 are connected through only one link, whereas other peripheral clusters connect mainly through one or two intermediary nodes.
  • Clusters 1 and 2 are substantively large despite their peripheral network positions: Cluster 1 exceeds the combined size of the two hubs, and Cluster 2 is nearly as large.Cluster 1 represents nonprofit organizations and sectoral governance, while Cluster 2 consists of social movement literature.
  • PNPS is not a coherent field organized around one intellectual core but a system of three spheres: nonprofit organizations, social movements, and a voluntary-action alliance.The voluntary-action sphere comprises small, closely linked clusters led by the dual hubs of charitable contributions and experimental cooperation.

Interconnectedness Across Clusters

Citation exchange is concentrated among selected clusters rather than evenly distributed across PNPS. The field’s publication landscape is also highly dispersed, and mainstream journals represent only part of its topical range.

  • Interconnectedness Across Clusters: Clusters 6, 7, and 8 show the strongest mutual citation concentrations in the normalized interconnectedness heatmap.These clusters concern charitable contributions, experimental cooperation, and the biological evolution of cooperation and altruism.
  • Interconnectedness Across Clusters: Strong citation connections also link charitable contributions with corporate philanthropy and nonprofit communication, while Cluster 1 connects strongly with Cluster 16.Most cluster pairs outside the central region exhibit much weaker connections.
  • Temporal Evolution: Clusters 1, 2, 3, and 4 form an early historical foundation, while Clusters 5 and 7 expand from the 1990s onward and Clusters 16 and 17 emerge more recently.Clusters 8, 9, and 10 were more prominent earlier but later represented smaller portions of the literature.
  • Journal Representation: PNPS-related research appears in 9,014 journals across 243 subject categories, with nearly two-thirds of journals containing fewer than five relevant articles.The distribution indicates a highly dispersed publication landscape.
  • Journal Representation: The three flagship journals account for 2,946 articles, while seventeen mainstream PNPS journals together account for 6,752 articles focused primarily on four clusters.Their articles primarily concern nonprofit organizations, civic engagement, charitable contributions, and social entrepreneurship.
  • Journal Representation: Mainstream PNPS journals do not cover several clusters, including experimental cooperation, evolutionary altruism, global health NGOs, and biological donations.These areas are more commonly published in economics, biology, and public-health disciplinary outlets.

Underdeveloped and Dispersed Areas

Some PNPS areas are weakly connected or absent as cohesive communities, while the broader corpus extends across disciplines and publication venues. The study also identifies methodological and corpus boundaries that constrain interpretation.

  • Underdeveloped Areas: Self-help and mutual-aid research is weakly connected partly because the search omitted member-benefit nonprofit keywords such as labor unions and fraternal societies.Its only unexpected connection is through faith-based organizations and voluntary social service.
  • Underdeveloped Areas: Governance of the commons comprises merely 600 articles and connects to the rest of the network through one link, despite major cited scholarship on the topic.The passage contrasts this cluster’s network position with the citation counts of Ostrom and Hardin’s seminal works.
  • Underdeveloped Areas: No distinct cluster consolidates legal and public-policy research on nonprofits and philanthropy, including regulation, taxation, and policy influence.The passage presents this as an underdeveloped area within the mapped field.
  • Disciplinary Breadth: The broader corpus identifies over 60,000 field-related WoS articles and substantial scholarship in life sciences, biomedicine, technology, and other domains beyond the social sciences and humanities.The field’s total citations increased sharply with publication growth, while citations per publication increased more slowly.
  • Field Structure: The citation network identifies 20 topical clusters and three loosely connected power centers: nonprofit organizations, social movements, and voluntary action.Voluntary action is an alliance of smaller streams including charitable contributions, prosocial behavior, cooperation, and altruism.
  • Limitations: Because the WoS underrepresents books, practitioner outlets, and some smaller journals, the analysis primarily reflects journal-based scholarly literature.This boundary is especially relevant in PNPS, where books and practitioner publications help shape discourse and inform practice.
  • Limitations: Corpus boundaries depend on keyword selection, and terms such as “voluntary” and “grant” generate substantial retrieval noise.The study combines explicit retrieval rules with citation structure while remaining agnostic about whether some clusters belong to PNPS or adjacent fields.
  • Implications: The mapping functions as a nomenclature system that helps scholars situate work, identify gaps, and recognize emerging directions of inquiry.The conclusion calls for future research to strengthen PNPS coherence by aligning its conventional focus with wider intellectual connections.

Notes

The study notes methodological and data-access qualifications for interpreting its citation-network map. Cluster assignments can vary at boundaries, while the underlying structure remains stable; the underlying Web of Science data are proprietary.

  • Methodological notes: The Leiden algorithm is stochastic, so publications near cluster boundaries may be assigned differently across optimization rounds.The authors state that small variations in cluster sizes can occur across rounds.
  • Methodological notes: Despite boundary-level variation, the overall community-cluster structure remains stable and consistent across analysis rounds.
  • Methodological notes: Isolated articles were excluded because articles lacking citation links cannot form meaningful clusters.
  • Data access: Web of Science data are not publicly available because of the database's proprietary nature, although code is available upon request.An interactive map allows searches by keywords, titles, journals, and publication years.

A. Curated Journal List (n=19)

The study defines its journal- and keyword-based corpus through curated outlet selection, scope restrictions, false-positive reduction, variation-sensitive searching, and multiple validation checks.

  • Curated journal list: The journal list includes established PNPS outlets such as Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Nonprofit Management & Leadership, VOLUNTAS, and Journal of Civil Society.
  • Scope definition: The corpus focuses on charitable philanthropic actors classified as 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) organizations.Other 501(c) categories, including mutual benefit organizations, are excluded.
  • Scope definition: The search includes formal nonprofit activities and less-studied informal philanthropic practices, while excluding terms such as micro-finance and cause-related marketing.
  • Keyword curation: Keyword curation removes broad, cross-disciplinary, redundant, and method-specific terms that generate false positives or no unique valid records.Examples include social innovation, social work, public good game, Giving Tuesday, and fiscal sponsor.
  • Keyword curation: The search combines singular, bi-gram, paired, and variation-specific terms, while excluding high-noise combinations and terms with recurring irrelevant associations.For example, giving is refined through gift giving or giving paired with pledge, and problematic altruistic variations are excluded.
  • Validation: Three authors independently validated a random keyword subset, using Gwet's AC1 alongside manual relevance reviews to assess inclusion decisions.Keywords with no results or substantial irrelevance were excluded during review.

C. ChatGPT-4o Raw Outputs

The mapped clusters span nonprofit organizations, social and political movements, civic engagement, prosocial behavior, cooperation, altruism, public goods, and charitable giving. Together, they show PNPS-related scholarship encompasses organizational, civic, behavioral, evolutionary, economic, and political research.

  • Nonprofit organizations: Nonprofit-sector research examines organizational roles, revenue diversification, accountability, professionalism, and relationships with government and nongovernmental entities.These themes frame nonprofit organizations through governance, funding, partnerships, and mission-oriented goals.
  • Social and political movements: Social-movement research focuses on organization, political impact, framing, collective identity, protest, campaigns, solidarity, and social change.The cluster includes grassroots, transnational, feminist, democratic, and ethnographic research.
  • Prosocial behavior: Prosocial-behavior research examines how empathy, age, and emotional awareness relate to helping tendencies among children and adolescents.The associated vocabulary includes prosocial behavior, emotional processes, peers, schools, and self-reports.
  • Civic engagement and voluntary action: Civic-engagement research links volunteering and participation with social capital, community involvement, political engagement, and sustained volunteerism.It also considers dispositional influences, organizational support, voluntary associations, and transitions from youth to adulthood.
  • Cooperation and altruism: Cooperation research investigates public-goods games, punishment, reciprocity, free riding, reputation, evolutionary mechanisms, and laboratory experiments.Related work also examines altruism across primates, birds, bacteria, and other species through kin selection, relatedness, fitness, and reciprocal altruism.
  • Public goods and provision: Public-goods scholarship addresses non-excludability, non-rivalry, taxation, government expenditure, efficiency, distribution, federalism, and centralized versus decentralized provision.The cluster also includes equilibrium analysis, Pareto efficiency, Samuelson's model, voter preferences, and government incentives.

Cluster 11

This cluster examines self-help and mutual-aid groups in relation to mental health, substance-abuse recovery, health services, and empowerment. Its research includes peer support, rehabilitation, clinical settings, and participation across different populations.

  • Role of Self-Help and Mutual Aid Groups in Health and Empowerment: Self-help and mutual-aid research examines mental health, substance-abuse recovery, chronic disease, health care, and social support.The cluster includes interventions, rehabilitation, abstinence, psychiatric settings, and peer support.
  • Role of Self-Help and Mutual Aid Groups in Health and Empowerment: Studies also address empowerment and participation among women, rural populations, and members of self-help or mutual-aid groups.Related terms include women’s empowerment, group participation, referrals, and health services.

Cluster 12

The mapped clusters span prosocial workplace behavior, Islamic waqf and charity, intergenerational altruism, and commons governance. Together, they connect philanthropic inquiry with organizational, economic, religious, and environmental research.

  • Prosocial Behavior and Motivation in the Workplace: Prosocial workplace research examines how intrinsic and prosocial motivations shape employee behavior, performance, relationships, and organizational dynamics.Studies address mediating roles and boundary conditions across industries, including service and hospitality.
  • Islamic Waqf and Charity Practices: Islamic waqf scholarship studies religious endowments for charity, including their institutionalization, legal frameworks, historical contexts, and socioeconomic effects.The cluster covers Malaysia, Indonesia, the Ottoman Empire, colonial South Asia, poverty alleviation, and Islamic finance.
  • Intergenerational Altruism and Economic Behavior: Intergenerational altruism research focuses on transfers within economic models, including parental altruism, remittances, inheritance, social security, and capital accumulation.Its vocabulary includes overlapping generations, utility functions, Nash equilibria, and economic growth.
  • The Dynamics of the Commons and Public Goods: Commons and public-goods research addresses collective governance of natural resources, property rights, conservation, ecological systems, and environmental challenges.Recurring applications include fisheries, forests, water, agriculture, biodiversity, and climate change.

Cluster 16

These clusters extend PNPS-related scholarship across nonprofit communication, faith-based social services, global health, gift exchange, and altruistic donation. The topics connect organizational practice with digital, religious, health, cultural, and ethical domains.

  • Social Media Utilization by Nonprofit Organizations: Nonprofit social-media research examines Facebook and Twitter as communication channels for stakeholder engagement, public relations, marketing, digital content, and fundraising.Its prominent terms include communication, online information, content analysis, and nonprofit organizations.
  • Role of Faith-Based Organizations in Voluntary Social Services: Faith-based organization research studies voluntary social-service provision, food insecurity, partnerships with secular organizations, and operations within changing welfare systems.The cluster considers Canada, England, and other contexts shaped by neoliberalism, austerity, and social-policy reform.
  • Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in Global Health Care and HIV Prevention: NGO and community-based organization research examines global health-care delivery and HIV prevention, especially in low- and middle-income countries.It covers partnerships, health-system strengthening, capacity building, volunteerism, and evidence-based interventions.
  • The Dynamics of Gift Giving: Cultural and Consumer Perspectives: Gift-giving research integrates cultural, anthropological, and consumer perspectives on exchange, reciprocity, rituals, consumption, marketing, and gift economies.The cluster emphasizes relationships among givers, recipients, and social occasions.
  • Altruism in Organ and Gamete Donation: Motivations and Ethical Considerations: Altruistic-donation research examines motivations and ethical considerations surrounding organ and gamete donation.It considers directed and nondirected donation alongside personal, societal, and moral dimensions.
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