Research Topics in Applied Linguistics as Keywords from Authors and Keywords from Abstracts: A Bibliometric Study

Applied linguists are increasingly looking to bibliometric analyses for top-down insights into the rapidly expanding and diversifying body of literature and to stay abreast of research trends in order to make informed decisions about what issues to research. Authors’ choices of keywords play an important role in conveying the topic of a research article, yet recent applied linguistics bibliometric analyses have largely ignored them. This study examines the author-provided keywords of 23,481 research articles across 42 high-ranking applied linguistics publications during three intervals between 2001 and 2021. It identifies (1) the prevalence of author-supplied keywords, (2) their lengths (measured in words), (3) syntactic structural patterns (e.g., noun + noun), (4) constituent word classes (e.g., noun, adjective, preposition), and, (5) the most frequent research topics as measured by keywords from authors and abstracts. The study found increasing standardisation in the provision of author keywords across research articles, especially combinations of four to six keywords that heavily featured nouns and adjectives in one to three-word phrases. The study identified several themes among topics of enduring, rising, and falling prevalence, although a notable divergence was exhibited between keywords from authors and abstracts. The implications for future bibliometric analyses that investigate research topics and other meta-research that utilises author-assigned keywords are discussed.