Both community ecology and trait-based ecology have in recent years exploded with a range of important strands of theory. A current goal of the field is to connect these two sub-disciplines, both theoretically and empirically. While there has been progress in building these links, one impediment has been the vast array of different theory strands in community ecology, each with different assumptions.  These assumptions structure the ways in which community-level theory strands can be connected to trait ecology. To better help build these connections in the future, we present a review of the recent community ecology literature, using new bibliometrics tools.  We explicitly examine which processes are explicitly considered in each theory/model. The resulting map of the recent literature will help us draw better links between the three key pieces of the puzzle: community ecology theory, theoretical trait ecology, and empirical data. We hypothesis that clearly identifying the set of possible connections between trait and community ecology will facilitate progress on a wide range of important problems in ecology.