Describing the structure of a research literature: spatial diffusion modelling in geography

A description of the structure of research specialities requires the definition of a series of sets and relations. A set of papers concerned with spatial diffusion modelling is defined, and the structure of the citation relation defined on that set is explored. A detailed reading of the texts of the papers allows us to extract a series of 'terms' (concepts, techniques, and so on), and problems of structuring these in a hierarchical scheme are discussed. The relation of papers to terms is then analysed for a few of the early papers in the literature. Citations may be thought of as traffic on the backcloth.