Exploring the Evolution of Applied Linguistics: A Bibliometric Survey of Major Research Paradigms

Using bibliometric and data mining tools, this chapter gives an empirical analysis of the evolution of Applied Linguistics (AL) research. CiteSpace was utilized to conduct a co-citation analysis on the bibliographic information of 23,790 research articles from the most representative AL journals indexed in the Web of Science (Clarivate. Web of Science Core Collection: Search Tips, 2022. https://clarivate.libguides.com/woscc/searchtips . Accessed 16 Nov 2022) database since the launch of the journals. After categorizing the articles into 12 key research areas, they were critically assessed in terms of their respective paradigms. The results show the evolution of paradigms in AL research, with positivism being the dominant paradigm. Additionally, three other paradigms, namely, constructivism, critical theory, and post-positivism, were found to coexist in the field, although to varying degrees. The authors of this study employed a dictionary model to mine the dataset. This is the first study to combine data mining techniques and bibliometric methodology to explore paradigms in AL research, providing new insights into the field and contributing to scientometrics.