Mapping the Research Gaze: Structures of empirical research into racism and right-wing extremism in Germany

Research data infrastructures are primarily designed to facilitate the findability and reuse of research data. Drawing on domain-specific metadata developed within the German Data Portal for Racism and Right-Wing Extremism Research (DP-R|EX), including theoretical concepts and social groups represented in the data, this study demonstrates how such metadata can serve as a valuable resource for investigating the historical development and epistemic structure of scientific fields. Specifically, we examine how empirical research into racism and right-wing extremism (R|EX) in German-speaking countries has evolved over the past five decades, using a metadata corpus comprising 399 studies conducted between the early 1970s and the present. Analytically, we combine descriptive statistics, temporal analyses, and co-occurrence network analysis to examine methodological developments, conceptual structures, and operationalization strategies. The analyses demonstrate that the field has consistently adapted to evolving socio-political contexts and historical trends, shifting from a relatively coherent focus on classical socio-psychological explanations of prejudice and authoritarianism towards a more diverse landscape encompassing migration, democratic governance, social inequality, and other contemporary societal challenges. Additionally, the analysis highlights the systematic underrepresentation of specific social minorities, whose presence in the field's conceptual vocabulary does not always translate into sustained empirical attention, pointing to structural blind spots that persist despite growing data availability that other research data infrastructures can also learn from.