Disciplinarity and the Organisation of Scholarly Writing in Educational Studies in the UK: 1970-2010

This paper explores the organisation of scholarly articles in educational studies in the UK through an analysis of the outputs of six key journals. Using citation networks and text analyses it examines connections that are made between papers, journals, authors and the themes discussed in the six journals. Scholarly papers are particularly suitable for this kind of analysis because of the expectation that authors "locate" their work within existing knowledge, making explicit connections between their contribution and the field (or discipline) in which they are working. This analysis utilises these connections in order to understand how papers in disciplinary and non-disciplinary journals relate to one another in terms of the bodies of knowledge on which they draw, where papers are then cited, and the degree to which authors cross disciplinary boundaries or remain within their "parent" discipline. (Contains 10 tables, 7 figures and 10 notes.)