The search for new knowledge represents a core aspect to increase organizational performance and achieve a competitive advantage. By engaging in external search, organizations strive to utilize distributed knowledge sources to enrich their knowledge base. While research attention on external search has been strong over the past years, it appears that scholars prefer to concentrate on rather isolated bodies of literature and miss connections among them. Against this background, we aim to analyze the current research on external search and to identify the intellectual pillars of the field as well as to provide a landscape of different research streams. By conducting an extensive literature co-citation and content analysis of relevant publications, we are able to reveal a fragmentation of the research field and disjoint schools of thought. We uncover the intellectual pillars, their linkages to each other, and the theoretical foundation of the research field on external search. Our findings help scholars to navigate on the complex topic landscape of external search and provide implications and future research directions to further drive the development of the field.