The document describes an investigation of using self-organizing maps (SOM) for genetic algorithms (GA). Specifically, it proposes an algorithm called self-organizing maps for genetic algorithms (SOM-GA) which combines real-coded genetic algorithms (RCGA) and SOM clustering. A SOM is trained using the population's individuals, and sub-populations are defined by clustering individuals around best matching SOM units. RCGA is then performed iteratively in each sub-population to improve local search performance over the original RCGA. The SOM-GA shows better solutions in shorter time than RCGA on test functions.