The Bibliometrics of Vocabulary Acquisition: An Exploratory Study.

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of the research literature on L2 vocabulary acquisition published in 2006. The paper uses a methodology known as Inclusive Author Co-citation. The method uses the pattern of citations appearing in a body of research papers to generate a map of an area of research. These maps reveal ‘hidden colleges’ within a subject field.The analysis presented here is based on citation data for 101 authors who are significantly cited in the 2006 literature. The analysis identifies four research clusters in the data. The two principle clusters – accounting for 96% of the data – are a psycholinguistic cluster dominated by de Groot, Kroll and David Green, and a mainstream vocabulary cluster dominated by Nation and Laufer. The two clusters are largely self-contained, with very dense patterns of connections between the members of the individual clusters. The analysis identifies only a small number of links between these two clusters. The network dissolves into 30 smaller clusters if the main players are removed from the analysis.The analysis broadly supports intuitive analyses of the L2 vocabulary acquisition literature, but provides some new objective data which supports these intuitions. The paper also suggests that co-citation analysis of this sort might provide a way of mapping changes in the discipline over time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]