Mapping the Field of Education: The Fads and Fashions of Education Research, 1980–2017

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Abstract

The field of education research is difficult to define. What are its research areas? What leads some research areas to grow and dominate the field’s discourse more than others? This paper maps the knowledge generated within the field from 1980-2017 by analyzing the pattern of language usage occurring in nearly 600 thousand texts. We employ structural topic modeling to identify sublanguages form distinct research areas. We illustrate how these topics vary in salience over time. We show that educational research is expanding its cadre of research subfields as a correlate of certain types of resource accumulation. Our results provide the first quantification of the field of education’s emerging knowledge base.

Authors

• Sebastian Munoz-Najar, Stanford University

• Daniel A. McFarland, Stanford University