list of research topics in applied linguistics

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211 Research Topics in Linguistics To Get Top Grades

Many people find it hard to decide on their linguistics research topics because of the assumed complexities involved. They struggle to choose easy research paper topics for English language too because they think it could be too simple for a university or college level certificate.

All that you need to learn about Linguistics and English is sprawled across syntax, phonetics, morphology, phonology, semantics, grammar, vocabulary, and a few others. To easily create a top-notch essay or conduct a research study, you can consider this list of research topics in English language below for your university or college use. Note that you can fine-tune these to suit your interests.

Linguistics Research Paper Topics

If you want to study how language is applied and its importance in the world, you can consider these Linguistics topics for your research paper. They are:

• An analysis of romantic ideas and their expression amongst French people
• An overview of the hate language in the course against religion
• Identify the determinants of hate language and the means of propagation
• Evaluate a literature and examine how Linguistics is applied to the understanding of minor languages
• Consider the impact of social media in the development of slangs
• An overview of political slang and its use amongst New York teenagers
• Examine the relevance of Linguistics in a digitalized world
• Analyze foul language and how it’s used to oppress minors
• Identify the role of language in the national identity of a socially dynamic society
• Attempt an explanation to how the language barrier could affect the social life of an individual in a new society
• Discuss the means through which language can enrich cultural identities
• Examine the concept of bilingualism and how it applies in the real world
• Analyze the possible strategies for teaching a foreign language
• Discuss the priority of teachers in the teaching of grammar to non-native speakers
• Choose a school of your choice and observe the slang used by its students: analyze how it affects their social lives
• Attempt a critical overview of racist languages
• What does endangered language means and how does it apply in the real world?
• A critical overview of your second language and why it is a second language
• What are the motivators of speech and why are they relevant?
• Analyze the difference between the different types of communications and their significance to specially-abled persons
• Give a critical overview of five literature on sign language
• Evaluate the distinction between the means of language comprehension between an adult and a teenager
• Consider a native American group and evaluate how cultural diversity has influenced their language
• Analyze the complexities involved in code-switching and code-mixing
• Give a critical overview of the importance of language to a teenager
• Attempt a forensic overview of language accessibility and what it means
• What do you believe are the means of communications and what are their uniqueness?
• Attempt a study of Islamic poetry and its role in language development
• Attempt a study on the role of Literature in language development
• Evaluate the Influence of metaphors and other literary devices in the depth of each sentence
• Identify the role of literary devices in the development of proverbs in any African country
• Cognitive Linguistics: analyze two pieces of Literature that offers a critical view of perception
• Identify and analyze the complexities in unspoken words
• Expression is another kind of language: discuss
• Identify the significance of symbols in the evolution of language
• Discuss how learning more than a single language promote cross-cultural developments
• Analyze how the loss of a mother tongue affect the language Efficiency of a community
• Critically examine how sign language works
• Using literature from the medieval era, attempt a study of the evolution of language
• Identify how wars have led to the reduction in the popularity of a language of your choice across any country of the world
• Critically examine five Literature on why accent changes based on environment
• What are the forces that compel the comprehension of language in a child
• Identify and explain the difference between the listening and speaking skills and their significance in the understanding of language
• Give a critical overview of how natural language is processed
• Examine the influence of language on culture and vice versa
• It is possible to understand a language even without living in that society: discuss
• Identify the arguments regarding speech defects
• Discuss how the familiarity of language informs the creation of slangs
• Explain the significance of religious phrases and sacred languages
• Explore the roots and evolution of incantations in Africa

Sociolinguistic Research Topics

You may as well need interesting Linguistics topics based on sociolinguistic purposes for your research. Sociolinguistics is the study and recording of natural speech. It’s primarily the casual status of most informal conversations. You can consider the following Sociolinguistic research topics for your research:

• What makes language exceptional to a particular person?
• How does language form a unique means of expression to writers?
• Examine the kind of speech used in health and emergencies
• Analyze the language theory explored by family members during dinner
• Evaluate the possible variation of language based on class
• Evaluate the language of racism, social tension, and sexism
• Discuss how Language promotes social and cultural familiarities
• Give an overview of identity and language
• Examine why some language speakers enjoy listening to foreigners who speak their native language
• Give a forensic analysis of his the language of entertainment is different to the language in professional settings
• Give an understanding of how Language changes
• Examine the Sociolinguistics of the Caribbeans
• Consider an overview of metaphor in France
• Explain why the direct translation of written words is incomprehensible in Linguistics
• Discuss the use of language in marginalizing a community
• Analyze the history of Arabic and the culture that enhanced it
• Discuss the growth of French and the influences of other languages
• Examine how the English language developed and its interdependence on other languages
• Give an overview of cultural diversity and Linguistics in teaching
• Challenge the attachment of speech defect with disability of language listening and speaking abilities
• Explore the uniqueness of language between siblings
• Explore the means of making requests between a teenager and his parents
• Observe and comment on how students relate with their teachers through language
• Observe and comment on the communication of strategy of parents and teachers
• Examine the connection of understanding first language with academic excellence

Language Research Topics

Numerous languages exist in different societies. This is why you may seek to understand the motivations behind language through these Linguistics project ideas. You can consider the following interesting Linguistics topics and their application to language:

• What does language shift mean?
• Discuss the stages of English language development?
• Examine the position of ambiguity in a romantic Language of your choice
• Why are some languages called romantic languages?
• Observe the strategies of persuasion through Language
• Discuss the connection between symbols and words
• Identify the language of political speeches
• Discuss the effectiveness of language in an indigenous cultural revolution
• Trace the motivators for spoken language
• What does language acquisition mean to you?
• Examine three pieces of literature on language translation and its role in multilingual accessibility
• Identify the science involved in language reception
• Interrogate with the context of language disorders
• Examine how psychotherapy applies to victims of language disorders
• Study the growth of Hindi despite colonialism
• Critically appraise the term, language erasure
• Examine how colonialism and war is responsible for the loss of language
• Give an overview of the difference between sounds and letters and how they apply to the German language
• Explain why the placement of verb and preposition is different in German and English languages
• Choose two languages of your choice and examine their historical relationship
• Discuss the strategies employed by people while learning new languages
• Discuss the role of all the figures of speech in the advancement of language
• Analyze the complexities of autism and its victims
• Offer a linguist approach to language uniqueness between a Down Syndrome child and an autist
• Express dance as a language
• Express music as a language
• Express language as a form of language
• Evaluate the role of cultural diversity in the decline of languages in South Africa
• Discuss the development of the Greek language
• Critically review two literary texts, one from the medieval era and another published a decade ago, and examine the language shifts

Linguistics Essay Topics

You may also need Linguistics research topics for your Linguistics essays. As a linguist in the making, these can help you consider controversies in Linguistics as a discipline and address them through your study. You can consider:

• The connection of sociolinguistics in comprehending interests in multilingualism
• Write on your belief of how language encourages sexism
• What do you understand about the differences between British and American English?
• Discuss how slangs grew and how they started
• Consider how age leads to loss of language
• Review how language is used in formal and informal conversation
• Discuss what you understand by polite language
• Discuss what you know by hate language
• Evaluate how language has remained flexible throughout history
• Mimicking a teacher is a form of exercising hate Language: discuss
• Body Language and verbal speech are different things: discuss
• Language can be exploitative: discuss
• Do you think language is responsible for inciting aggression against the state?
• Can you justify the structural representation of any symbol of your choice?
• Religious symbols are not ordinary Language: what are your perspective on day-to-day languages and sacred ones?
• Consider the usage of language by an English man and someone of another culture
• Discuss the essence of code-mixing and code-switching
• Attempt a psychological assessment on the role of language in academic development
• How does language pose a challenge to studying?
• Choose a multicultural society of your choice and explain the problem they face
• What forms does Language use in expression?
• Identify the reasons behind unspoken words and actions
• Why do universal languages exist as a means of easy communication?
• Examine the role of the English language in the world
• Examine the role of Arabic in the world
• Examine the role of romantic languages in the world
• Evaluate the significance of each teaching Resources in a language classroom
• Consider an assessment of language analysis
• Why do people comprehend beyond what is written or expressed?
• What is the impact of hate speech on a woman?
• Do you believe that grammatical errors are how everyone’s comprehension of language is determined?
• Observe the Influence of technology in language learning and development
• Which parts of the body are responsible for understanding new languages
• How has language informed development?
• Would you say language has improved human relations or worsened it considering it as a tool for violence?
• Would you say language in a black populous state is different from its social culture in white populous states?
• Give an overview of the English language in Nigeria
• Give an overview of the English language in Uganda
• Give an overview of the English language in India
• Give an overview of Russian in Europe
• Give a conceptual analysis on stress and how it works
• Consider the means of vocabulary development and its role in cultural relationships
• Examine the effects of Linguistics in language
• Present your understanding of sign language
• What do you understand about descriptive language and prescriptive Language?

List of Research Topics in English Language

You may need English research topics for your next research. These are topics that are socially crafted for you as a student of language in any institution. You can consider the following for in-depth analysis:

• Examine the travail of women in any feminist text of your choice
• Examine the movement of feminist literature in the Industrial period
• Give an overview of five Gothic literature and what you understand from them
• Examine rock music and how it emerged as a genre
• Evaluate the cultural association with Nina Simone’s music
• What is the relevance of Shakespeare in English literature?
• How has literature promoted the English language?
• Identify the effect of spelling errors in the academic performance of students in an institution of your choice
• Critically survey a university and give rationalize the literary texts offered as Significant
• Examine the use of feminist literature in advancing the course against patriarchy
• Give an overview of the themes in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”
• Express the significance of Ernest Hemingway’s diction in contemporary literature
• Examine the predominant devices in the works of William Shakespeare
• Explain the predominant devices in the works of Christopher Marlowe
• Charles Dickens and his works: express the dominating themes in his Literature
• Why is Literature described as the mirror of society?
• Examine the issues of feminism in Sefi Atta’s “Everything Good Will Come” and Bernadine Evaristos’s “Girl, Woman, Other”
• Give an overview of the stylistics employed in the writing of “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernadine Evaristo
• Describe the language of advertisement in social media and newspapers
• Describe what poetic Language means
• Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing on Mexican Americans
• Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing in Indian Americans
• Discuss the influence of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” on satirical literature
• Examine the Linguistics features of “Native Son” by Richard Wright
• What is the role of indigenous literature in promoting cultural identities
• How has literature informed cultural consciousness?
• Analyze five literature on semantics and their Influence on the study
• Assess the role of grammar in day to day communications
• Observe the role of multidisciplinary approaches in understanding the English language
• What does stylistics mean while analyzing medieval literary texts?
• Analyze the views of philosophers on language, society, and culture

English Research Paper Topics for College Students

For your college work, you may need to undergo a study of any phenomenon in the world. Note that they could be Linguistics essay topics or mainly a research study of an idea of your choice. Thus, you can choose your research ideas from any of the following:

• The concept of fairness in a democratic Government
• The capacity of a leader isn’t in his or her academic degrees
• The concept of discrimination in education
• The theory of discrimination in Islamic states
• The idea of school policing
• A study on grade inflation and its consequences
• A study of taxation and Its importance to the economy from a citizen’s perspectives
• A study on how eloquence lead to discrimination amongst high school students
• A study of the influence of the music industry in teens
• An Evaluation of pornography and its impacts on College students
• A descriptive study of how the FBI works according to Hollywood
• A critical consideration of the cons and pros of vaccination
• The health effect of sleep disorders
• An overview of three literary texts across three genres of Literature and how they connect to you
• A critical overview of “King Oedipus”: the role of the supernatural in day to day life
• Examine the novel “12 Years a Slave” as a reflection of servitude and brutality exerted by white slave owners
• Rationalize the emergence of racist Literature with concrete examples
• A study of the limits of literature in accessing rural readers
• Analyze the perspectives of modern authors on the Influence of medieval Literature on their craft
• What do you understand by the mortality of a literary text?
• A study of controversial Literature and its role in shaping the discussion
• A critical overview of three literary texts that dealt with domestic abuse and their role in changing the narratives about domestic violence
• Choose three contemporary poets and analyze the themes of their works
• Do you believe that contemporary American literature is the repetition of unnecessary themes already treated in the past?
• A study of the evolution of Literature and its styles
• The use of sexual innuendos in literature
• The use of sexist languages in literature and its effect on the public
• The disaster associated with media reports of fake news
• Conduct a study on how language is used as a tool for manipulation
• Attempt a criticism of a controversial Literary text and why it shouldn’t be studied or sold in the first place

Finding Linguistics Hard To Write About?

With these topics, you can commence your research with ease. However, if you need professional writing help for any part of the research, you can scout here online for the best research paper writing service.

There are several expert writers on ENL hosted on our website that you can consider for a fast response on your research study at a cheap price.

As students, you may be unable to cover every part of your research on your own. This inability is the reason you should consider expert writers for custom research topics in Linguistics approved by your professor for high grades.

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Applied Linguistics Research: Current Issues, Methods, and Trends

Research output : Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

This chapter provides a broad contextualisation of the Handbook, locating its focus within current debates and concerns of relevance to the field of applied linguistics. The editors highlight the field’s growing interest in research methodology and offer a rationale for the selection of topics and issues in the Handbook, such as methodological reform, transparency, transdisciplinarity, and the impact of technology.

• Applied linguistics
• Data analysis
• Methodology
• Research instruments

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• General Arts and Humanities
• General Social Sciences

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• 10.1057/978-1-137-59900-1_1

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• Applied Linguistics Social Sciences 100%
• Linguistic Research Social Sciences 100%
• Guides Social Sciences 100%
• Transdisciplinarity Social Sciences 50%
• Interest in Research Keyphrases 50%

T1 - Applied Linguistics Research

T2 - Current Issues, Methods, and Trends

AU - Phakiti, Aek

AU - De Costa, Peter

AU - Plonsky, Luke

AU - Starfield, Sue

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018.

PY - 2018/1/1

Y1 - 2018/1/1

N2 - This chapter provides a broad contextualisation of the Handbook, locating its focus within current debates and concerns of relevance to the field of applied linguistics. The editors highlight the field’s growing interest in research methodology and offer a rationale for the selection of topics and issues in the Handbook, such as methodological reform, transparency, transdisciplinarity, and the impact of technology.

AB - This chapter provides a broad contextualisation of the Handbook, locating its focus within current debates and concerns of relevance to the field of applied linguistics. The editors highlight the field’s growing interest in research methodology and offer a rationale for the selection of topics and issues in the Handbook, such as methodological reform, transparency, transdisciplinarity, and the impact of technology.

KW - Applied linguistics

KW - Data analysis

KW - Ethics

KW - Methodology

KW - Research instruments

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85122839932&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85122839932&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1057/978-1-137-59900-1_1

DO - 10.1057/978-1-137-59900-1_1

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85122839932

SN - 9781137598998

BT - The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Linguistics Research Methodology

PB - Palgrave Macmillan

Home > School, College, or Department > CLAS > Applied Linguistics > Dissertations and Theses

Applied Linguistics Dissertations and Theses

Theses/dissertations from 2024 2024.

Prosodic Analysis of Wh -indeterminate Questions in L2 Korean , Jung In Lee

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Critical Analysis of Anti-Asian Hate in the News , Benardo Douglas Relampagos

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of NASA's Instagram Account , Danica Lynn Tomber

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

A Computer Science Academic Vocabulary List , David Roesler

Variation in Female and Male Dialogue in Buffy the Vampire Slayer : A Multi-dimensional Analysis , Amber Morgan Sanchez

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Differences in Syntactic Complexity in the Writing of EL1 and ELL Civil Engineering Students , Santiago Gustin

A Mixed Methods Analysis of Corpus Data from Reddit Discussions of "Gay Voice" , Sara Elizabeth Mulliner

Relationship Between Empathy and Language Proficiency in Adult Language Learners , Mika Sakai

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

College Student Rankings of Multiple Speakers in a Public Speaking Context: a Language Attitudes Study on Japanese-accented English with a World Englishes Perspective , John James Ahlbrecht

Grammatical Errors by Arabic ESL Students: an Investigation of L1 Transfer through Error Analysis , Aisha Saud Alasfour

Foreign Language Anxiety, Sexuality, and Gender: Lived Experiences of Four LGBTQ+ Students , James Donald Mitchell

Verb Stem Alternation in Vaiphei , Jesse Prichard

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Teacher and Student Perceptions of World Englishes (WE) Pronunciations in two US Settings , Marie Arrieta

Escalating Language at Traffic Stops: Two Case Studies , Jamalieh Haley

Lexical Bundles in Applied Linguistics and Literature Writing: a Comparison of Intermediate English Learners and Professionals , Kathryn Marie Johnston

Multilingualism and Multiculturalism: Opinions from Spanish-Speaking English Learners from Mexico, Central America, and South America , Cailey Catherine Moe

An Analytical System for Determining Disciplinary Vocabulary for Data-Driven Learning: an Example from Civil Engineering , Philippa Jean Otto

Loanwords in Context: Lexical Borrowing from English to Japanese and its Effects on Second-Language Vocabulary Acquisition , Andrew Michael Sowers

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

The Effect of Extended Instruction on Passive Voice, Reduced Relative Clauses, and Modal Would in the Academic Writing of Advanced English Language Learners , Audrey Bailey

Identity Construction and Language Use by Immigrant Women in a Microenterprise Development Program , Linda Eve Bonder

"That's the test?" Washback Effects of an Alternative Assessment in a Culturally Heterogeneous EAP University Class , Abigail Bennett Carrigan

Wiki-based Collaborative Creative Writing in the ESL Classroom , Rima Elabdali

A Study of the Intelligibility, Comprehensibility and Interpretability of Standard Marine Communication Phrases as Perceived by Chinese Mariners , Lillian Christine Holland

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Empowering All Who Teach: A Portrait of Two Non-Native English Speaking Teachers in a Globalized 21st Century , Rosa Dene David

A Corpus Based Analysis of Noun Modification in Empirical Research Articles in Applied Linguistics , Jo-Anne Hutter

Sound Effects: Age, Gender, and Sound Symbolism in American English , Timothy Allen Krause

Perspectives on the College Readiness and Outcome Achievement of Former Intensive English Language Program (IELP) Students , Meghan Oswalt

The Cognitive Development of Expertise in an ESL Teacher: A Case Study , Lyndsey Roos

Identity and Investment in the Community ESL Classroom , Jennifer Marie Sacklin

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Code Switching Between Tamazight and Arabic in the First Libyan Berber News Broadcast: An Application of Myers-Scotton's MLF and 4M Models , Ashour S. Abdulaziz

Self-Efficacy in Low-Level English Language Learners , Laura F. Blumenthal

The Impact of Wiki-based Collaborative Writing on English L2 Learners' Individual Writing Development , Gina Christina Caruso

Latino Men Managing HIV: An Appraisal Analysis of Intersubjective Relations in the Discourse of Five Research Interviews , Will Caston

Opportunities for Incidental Acquisition of Academic Vocabulary from Teacher Speech in an English for Academic Purposes Classroom , Eric Dean Dodson

Emerging Lexical Organization from Intentional Vocabulary Learning , Adam Jones

Effects of the First Language on Japanese ESL Learners' Answers to Negative Questions , Kosuke Kanda

"Had sh'er haute gamme, high technology": An Application of the MLF and 4-M Models to French-Arabic Codeswitching in Algerian Hip Hop , Samuel Nickilaus McLain-Jespersen

Is Self-Sufficiency Really Sufficient? A Critical Analysis of Federal Refugee Resettlement Policy and Local Attendant English Language Training in Portland, Oregon , Domminick McParland

Explorations into the Psycholinguistic Validity of Extended Collocations , J. Arianna Morgan

A Comparison of Linguistic Features in the Academic Writing of Advanced English Language Learner and English First Language University Students , Margo K. Russell

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

The First Year: Development of Preservice Teacher Beliefs About Teaching and Learning During Year One of an MA TESOL Program , Emily Spady Addiego

L1 Influence on L2 Intonation in Russian Speakers of English , Christiane Fleur Crosby

English Loan Words in Japanese: Exploring Comprehension and Register , Naoko Horikawa

The Role of Expectations on Nonnative English Speaking Students' Wrtiting , Sara Marie Van Dan Acker

Hypothetical Would-Clauses in Korean EFL Textbooks: An Analysis Based on a Corpus Study and Focus on Form Approach , Soyung Yoo

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

Negative Transfer in the Writing of Proficient Students of Russian: A Comparison of Heritage Language Learners and Second Language Learners , Daria Aleeva

Informal Learning Choices of Japanese ESL Students in the United States , Brent Harrison Amburgey

Iktomi: A Character Traits Analysis of a Dakota Culture Myth , Marianne Sue Kastner

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Motivation in Late Learners of Japanese: Self-Determination Theory, Attitudes and Pronunciation , Shannon Guinn-Collins

Foreign Language Students' Beliefs about Homestays , Sara Racheal Juveland

Teaching Intonation Patterns through Reading Aloud , Micah William Park

Disordered Thought, Disordered Language: A corpus-based description of the speech of individuals undergoing treatment for schizophrenia , Lucas Carl Steuber

Emotion Language and Emotion Narratives of Turkish-English Late Bilinguals , Melike Yücel Koç

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

A Library and its Community: Exploring Perceptions of Collaboration , Phoebe Vincenza Daurio

A Structural and Functional Analysis of Codeswitching in Mi Vida Gitana 'My Gypsy Life,' a Bilingual Play , Gustavo Javier Fernandez

Writing Chinuk Wawa: A Materials Development Case Study , Sarah A. Braun Hamilton

Teacher Evaluation of Item Formats for an English Language Proficiency Assessment , Jose Luis Perea-Hernandez

Theses/Dissertations from 2009 2009

Building Community and Bridging Cultures: the Role of Volunteer Tutors in Oregon’s Latino Serving Community-Based Organizations , Troy Vaughn Hickman

Theses/Dissertations from 2007 2007

Beyond the Classroom Walls: a Study of Out-Of-Class English Use by Adult Community College ESL Students , Tracey Louise Knight

Theses/Dissertations from 2004 2004

A Dialect Study of Oregon NORMs , Lisa Wittenberg Hillyard

Theses/Dissertations from 2003 2003

The Acquisition of a Stage Dialect , Nathaniel George Halloran

Self-perceptions of non-native English speaking teachers of English as a second language , Kathryn Ann Long

The Development of Language Choice in a German Immersion School , Miranda Kussmaul Novash

Theses/Dissertations from 2002 2002

Writing in the Contact Zone: Three Portraits of Reflexivity and Transformation , Laurene L. Christensen

A Linguistic Evaluation of the Somali Women's Self Sufficiency Project , Ann Marie Kasper

Theses/Dissertations from 2001 2001

Attitudes at the Bank : A Survey of Reactions to Different Varieties of English , Sean Wilcox

Theses/Dissertations from 2000 2000

A Comparison of the Child Directed Speech of Traditional Dads With That of Stay-At-Home Dads , Judith Nancarrow Barr

Error Correction Preferences of Latino ESL Students , John Burrell

The Relationship Between Chinese Character Recognition Strategies and the Success of Character Memorization for Students of Mandarin Chinese , Hui-yen Emmy Chen

Portland dialect study: the story of /æ/ in Portland , Jeffrey C. Conn

On Communicative Competence : Its Nature and Origin , Mary Lou Emerson

The Influence of Cultural Backgrounds on the Interpretations of Literature Texts Used in the ESL Classroom , Barbara Jostrom Gates

Chinese Numeratives and the Mass/Count Distinction , David Goodman

Learning, Motivation, and Self : A Diary Study of an ESL Teacher’s Year in a Japanese Language Classroom , Laura Ruth Hawks

Portland Dialect Study - High Rising Terminal Contours (HRTs) in Portland Speech , Rebecca A. Wolff

Theses/Dissertations from 1998 1998

The Bolinger Principle and Teaching the Gerunds and Infinitives , Anna Maria Baratta-Zborowski

Training for Volunteer Teachers in Church-Affiliated English Language Mission Programs , Janet Noreen Blackwood

Šawaš ılıˀ--šawaš wawa: A Participant Observation Case Study of Language Planning by the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon , Gregry Michael Davis

Phonological Processing of Japanese Kanji Characters , Randy L. Evans

Academic ESL Reading : Semantic Mapping and Lexical Acquisition , Jeffrey Darin Maggard

The Representation of Gender in Current ESL Reading Materials , Kyunghee Ma

Perception of English Passives by Japanese ESL Learners : Do Adversity Passives in L1 Transfer? , Koichi Sawasaki

Theses/Dissertations from 1997 1997

Non-Literate Students in Adult Beginning English as a Second Language Classrooms - A Case Study , Sandra Lynn Banke

A Case Study of Twelve Japanese ESL Students' Use of Interaction Modifications , Darin Dooley

The Home-School Connection: Parental Influences on a Child's ESL Acquisition , Catharine Jauhiainen

A Comparison of Two Second Language Acquisition Models for Culturally and Linguistically Different Students , Karen Dorothy Kuhn

ESL CD-ROM Principles and their Application: A Software Evaluation , Stephanie Burgi LaMonica

Developing a Language in Education Policy for Post-apartheid South Africa: A Case Study , Nancy Murray

Video Self-Monitoring as an Alternative to Traditional Methods of Pronunciation Instruction , P. C. Noble

Analysis of Rhetorical Organization and Style Patterns in Korean and American Business Fax Letters of Complaint in English , Mi Young Park

The Importance of Time for Processing in Second Language Comprehension and Acquisition , Jennifer Lee Watson

Theses/Dissertations from 1996 1996

The Constraints of a Typological Implicational Universal for Interrogatives on Second Language Acquisition , Dee Anne Bess

An Assessment of the Needs of International Students for Student Services at Southern Oregon State College , Molly K. Emmons

The relationship between a pre-departure training program and its participants' intercultural communication competence , Daniel Timothy Ferguson

An Exploratory Evaluation of Language and Culture Contact by Japanese Sojourners in a Short-term US Academic Program , Elizabeth Anna Hartley

Correction of Classroom Oral Errors: Preferences among University Students of English in Japan , Akemi Katayama

An Analysis of Japanese Learners' Comprehension of Intonation in English , Misako Okubo

An Evaluation of English Spoken Fluency of Thai Graduate Students in the United States , Sugunya Ruangjaroon

A Cross-cultural Study of the Speech Act of Refusing in English and German , Charla Margaret Teufel

Theses/Dissertations from 1995 1995

An Examination of the English Vocabulary Knowledge of Adult English-for-Academic-Purposes Students: Correlation with English Second-Language Proficiency and the Validity of Yes/No Vocabulary Tests , Robert Scott Fetter

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Trends and hot topics in linguistics studies from 2011 to 2021: A bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers

Associated data.

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found in the article/ supplementary material .

High citations most often characterize quality research that reflects the foci of the discipline. This study aims to spotlight the most recent hot topics and the trends looming from the highly cited papers (HCPs) in Web of Science category of linguistics and language & linguistics with bibliometric analysis. The bibliometric information of the 143 HCPs based on Essential Citation Indicators was retrieved and used to identify and analyze influential contributors at the levels of journals, authors, and countries. The most frequently explored topics were identified by corpus analysis and manual checking. The retrieved topics can be grouped into five general categories: multilingual-related , language teaching , and learning related , psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related , methods and tools-related , and others . Topics such as bi/multilingual(ism) , translanguaging , language/writing development , models , emotions , foreign language enjoyment (FLE) , cognition , anxiety are among the most frequently explored. Multilingual and positive trends are discerned from the investigated HCPs. The findings inform linguistic researchers of the publication characteristics of the HCPs in the linguistics field and help them pinpoint the research trends and directions to exert their efforts in future studies.

1. Introduction

Citations, as a rule, exhibit a skewed distributional pattern over the academic publications: a few papers accumulate an overwhelming large citations while the majority are rarely, if ever, cited. Correspondingly, the highly cited papers (HCPs) receive the greatest amount of attention in the academia as citations are commonly regarded as a strong indicator of research excellence. For academic professionals, following HCPs is an efficient way to stay current with the developments in a field and to make better informed decisions regarding potential research topics and directions to exert their efforts. For academic institutions, government and private agencies, and generally the science policy makers, they keep a close eye on and take advantage of this visible indicator, citations, to make more informed decisions on research funding allocation and science policy formulation. Under the backdrop of ever-growing academic outputs, there is noticeable attention shift from publication quantity to publication quality. Many countries are developing research policies to identify “excellent” universities, research groups, and researchers ( Danell, 2011 ). In a word, HCPs showcase high-quality research, encompass significant themes, and constitute a critical reference point in a research field as they are “gold bullion of science” ( Smith, 2007 ).

2. Literature review

Bibliometrics, a term coined by Pritchard (1969) , refers to the application of mathematical methods to the analysis of academic publications. Essentially this is a quantitative method to depict publication patterns within a given field based on a body of literature. There are many bibliometric studies on natural and social sciences in general ( Hsu and Ho, 2014 ; Zhu and Lei, 2022 ) and on various specific disciplines such as management sciences ( Liao et al., 2018 ), biomass research ( Chen and Ho, 2015 ), computer sciences ( Xie and Willett, 2013 ), and sport sciences ( Mancebo et al., 2013 ; Ríos et al., 2013 ), etc. In these studies, researchers tracked developments, weighed research impacts, and highlighted emerging scientific fronts with bibliometric methods. In the field of linguistics, bibliometric studies all occurred in the past few years ( van Doorslaer and Gambier, 2015 ; Lei and Liao, 2017 ; Gong et al., 2018 ; Lei and Liu, 2018 , 2019 ). These bibliometric studies mostly examined a sub-area of linguistics, such as corpus linguistics ( Liao and Lei, 2017 ), translation studies ( van Doorslaer and Gambier, 2015 ), the teaching of Chinese as a second/foreign language ( Gong et al., 2018 ), academic journals like System ( Lei and Liu, 2018 ) or Porta Linguarum ( Sabiote and Rodríguez, 2015 ), etc. Although Lei and Liu (2019) took the entire discipline of linguistics under investigation, their research is exclusively focused on applied linguistics and restricted in a limited number of journals (42 journals in total), leaving publications in other linguistics disciplines and qualified journals unexamined.

Over the recent years, a number of studies have been concerned with “excellent” papers or HCPs. For example, Small (2004) surveyed the HCPs authors’ opinions on why their papers are highly cited. The strong interest, the novelty, the utility, and the high importance of the work were among the most frequently mentioned. Most authors also considered that their selected HCPs are indeed based on their most important work in their academic career. Aksnes (2003) investigated the characteristics of HCPs and found that they were generally authored by a large number of scientists, often involving international collaboration. Some researchers even attempted to predict the HCPs by building mathematical models, implying “the first mover advantage in scientific publication” ( Newman, 2008 , 2014 ). In other words, papers published earlier in a field generally are more likely to accumulate more citations than those published later. Although many papers addressed HCPs from different perspectives, they held a common belief that HCPs are very different from less or zero cited papers and thus deserve utmost attention in academic research ( Aksnes, 2003 ; Blessinger and Hrycaj, 2010 ; Yan et al., 2022 ).

Although an increased focus on research quality can be observed in different fields, opinions diverge on the range and the inclusion criterion of excellent papers. Are they ‘highly cited’, ‘top cited’, or ‘most frequently cited’ papers? Aksnes (2003) noted two different approaches to define a highly cited article, involving absolute or relative thresholds, respectively. An absolute threshold stipulates a minimum number of citations for identifying excellent papers while a relative threshold employs the percentile rank classes, for example, the top 10% most highly cited papers in a discipline or in a publication year or in a publication set. It is important to note that citations differ significantly in different fields and disciplines. A HCP in natural sciences generally accumulates more citations than its counterpart in social sciences. Thus, it is necessary to investigate HCPs from different fields separately or adopt different inclusion criterion to ensure a valid comparison.

The present study has been motivated by two considerations. First, the sizable number of publications of varied qualities in a scientific field makes it difficult or even impossible to conduct any reliable and effective literature research. Focusing on the quality publications, the HCPs in particular, might lend more credibility to the findings on trends. Second, HCPs can serve as a great platform to discover potentially important information for the development of a discipline and understand the past, present, and future of the scientific structure. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the hot topics and publication trends in the Web of Science category of linguistics or language & linguistics (shortened as linguistics in later references) with bibliometric methods. The study aims to answer the following three questions:

• Who are the most productive and impactful contributors of the HCPs in WoS category of linguistics or language & linguistics in terms of publication venues, authors, and countries?
• What are the most frequently explored topics in HCPs?
• What are the general research trends revealed from the HCPs?

3. Materials and methods

Different from previous studies which used an arbitrary inclusion threshold (e.g., Blessinger and Hrycaj, 2010 ; Hsu and Ho, 2014 ), we rely on Essential Science Indicator (ESI) to identify the HCPs. Developed by Clarivate, a leading company in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics, ESI reveals emerging science trends as well as influential individuals, institutions, papers, journals, and countries in any scientific fields of inquiry by drawing on the complete WoS databases. ESI has been chosen for the following three reasons. First, ESI adopts a stricter inclusion criterion for HCPs identification. That is, a paper is selected as a HCP only when its citations exceed the top 1% citation threshold in each of the 22 ESI subject categories. Second, ESI is widely used and recognized for its reliability and authority in identifying the top-charting work, generating “excellent” metrics including hot and highly cited papers. Third, ESI automatically updates its database to generate the most recent HCPs, especially suitable for trend studies for a specified timeframe.

3.1. Data source

The data retrieval was completed at the portal of our university library on June 20, 2022. The methods to retrieve the data are described in Table 1 . The bibliometric indicators regarding the important contributors at journal/author/country levels were obtained. Specifically, after the research was completed, we clicked the “Analyze Results” bar on the result page for the detailed descriptive analysis of the retrieved bibliometric data.

Retrieval strategies.

Several points should be noted about the search strategies. First, we searched the bibliometric data from two sub-databases of WoS core collection: Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI). There is no need to include the sub-database of Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) because publications in the linguistics field are almost exclusively indexed in SSCI and A&HCI journals. WoS core collection was chosen as the data source because it boasts one of the most comprehensive and authoritative databases of bibliometric information in the world. Many previous studies utilized WoS to retrieve bibliometric data. van Oorschot et al. (2018) and Ruggeri et al. (2019) even indicated that WoS meets the highest standards in terms of impact factor and citation counts and hence guarantees the validity of any bibliometric analysis. Second, we do not restrict the document types as HCPs selection informed by ESI only considers articles and reviews. Third, we do not set the date range as the dataset of ESI-HCPs is automatically updated regularly to include the most recent 10 years of publications.

The aforementioned query obtained a total of 143 HCPs published in 48 journals contributed by 352 authors of 226 institutions. We then downloaded the raw bibliometric parameters of the 143 HCPs for follow-up analysis including publication years, authors, publication titles, countries, affiliations, abstracts, citation reports, etc. A complete list of the 143 HCPs can be found in the Supplementary Material . We collected the most recent impact factor (IF) of each journal from the 2022 Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

3.2. Data analysis

3.2.1. citation analysis.

A citation threshold is the minimum number of citations obtained by ranking papers in a research field in descending order by citation counts and then selecting the top fraction or percentage of papers. In ESI, the highly cited threshold reveals the minimum number of citations received by the top 1% of papers from each of the 10 database years. In other words, a paper has to meet the minimum citation threshold that varies by research fields and by years to enter the HCP list. Of the 22 research fields in ESI, Social Science, General is a broad field covering a number of WoS categories including linguistics and language & linguistics . We checked the ESI official website to obtain the yearly highly cited thresholds in the research field of Social Science , General as shown in Figure 1 ( https://esi.clarivate.com/ThresholdsAction.action ). As we can see, the longer a paper has been published, the more citations it has to receive to meet the threshold. We then divided the raw citation numbers of HCPs with the Highly Cited Thresholds in the corresponding year to obtain the normalized citations for each HCP.

Highly cited thresholds in the research field of Social Sciences, General.

3.2.2. Corpus analysis and manual checking

To determine the most frequently explored topics in these HCPs, we used both corpus-based analysis of word frequency and manual checking. Specifically, the more frequently a word or phrase occurs in a specifically designed corpus, the more likely it constitutes a research topic. In this study, we built an Abstract corpus with all the abstracts of the 143 HCPs, totaling 24,800 tokens. The procedures to retrieve the research topics in the Abstract corpus were as follows. First, the 143 pieces of abstracts were saved as separate .txt files in one folder. Second, AntConc ( Anthony, 2022 ), a corpus analysis tool for concordancing and text analysis, was employed to extract lists of n-grams (2–4) in decreasing order of frequency. We also generated a list of individual nouns because sometimes individual nouns can also constitute research topics. Considering our small corpus data, we adopted both frequency (3) and range criteria (3) for topic candidacy. That is, a candidate n-gram must occur at least 3 times and in at least 3 different abstract files. The frequency threshold guarantees the importance of the candidate topics while the range threshold guarantees that the topics are not overly crowded in a few number of publications. In this process, we actually tested the frequency and range thresholds several rounds for the inclusion of all the potential topics. In total, we obtained 531 nouns, 1,330 2-grams, 331 3-grams, and 81 4-grams. Third, because most of the retrieved n-grams cannot function as meaningful research topics, we manually checked all the candidate items and discussed extensively to decide their roles as potential research topics until full agreements were reached. Finally, we read all the abstracts of the 143 HCPs to further validate their roles as research topics. In the end, we got 118 topic items in total.

4.1. Main publication venues of HCPs

Of the 48 journals which published the 143 HCPs, 17 journals have contributed at least 3 HCPs ( Table 2 ), around 71.33% of the total examined HCPs (102/143), indicating that HCPs tend to be highly concentrated in a limited number of journals. The three largest publication outlets of HCPs are Bilingualism Language and Cognition (16), International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (11), and Modern Language Journal (10). Because each journal varies greatly in the number of papers published per year and the number of HCPs is associated with journal circulations, we divided the total number of papers (TP) in the examined years (2011–2021) with the number of the HCPs to acquire the HCP percentage for each journal (HCPs/TP). The three journals with the highest HCPs/TP percentage are Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2.26), Modern Language Journal (2.08), and Bilingualism Language and Cognition (1.74), indicating that papers published in these journals have a higher probability to enter the HCPs list.

Top 17 publication venues of HCPs.

N: the number of HCPs in each journal; N%: the percentage of HCPs in each journal in the total of 143 HCPs; TP: the total number of papers in the examined timespan (2011–2021); N/TP %: the percentage of HCPs in the total journal publications in the examined time span; TC/HCP: average citations of each HCP; R: journal ranking for the designated indicator; IF: Impact Factor in the year of 2022.

In terms of the general impact of the HCPs from each journal, we divided the number of HCPs with their total citations (TC) to obtain the average citations for each HCP (TC/HCP). The three journals with the highest TC/HCP are Journal of Memory and Language (837.86), Computational Linguistics (533.75), and Journal of Pragmatics (303.75). It indicates that even in the same WoS category, HCPs in different journals have strikingly different capability to accumulate citations. For example, the TC/HCP in System is as low as 31.73, which is even less than 4% of the highest TC/HCP in Journal of Memory and Language .

In regards to the latest journal impact factor (IF) in 2022, the top four journals with the highest IF are Computational Linguistics (7.778) , Modern Language Journal (7.5), Computer Assisted Language Learning (5.964), and Language Learning (5.24). According to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) quantile rankings in WoS category of linguistics , all the journals on the list belong to the Q 1 (the top 25%), indicating that contributors are more likely to be attracted to contribute and cite papers in these prestigious high impact journals.

4.2. Authors of HCPs

A total of 352 authors had their names listed in the 143 HCPs, of whom 33 authors appeared in at least 2 HCPs as shown in Table 3 . We also provided in Table 3 other indicators to evaluate the authors’ productivity and impact including the total number of citations (TC), the number of citations per HCP, and the number of First author or Corresponding author HCPs (FA/CA). The reason we include the FA/CA indicator is that first authors and corresponding authors are usually considered to contribute the most and should receive greater proportion of credit in academic publications ( Marui et al., 2004 ; Dance, 2012 ).

Authors with at least 2 HCPs.

N: number of HCPs from each author; FA/CA: first author or corresponding author HCPs; TC: total citations of the HCPs from each author; C/HCP: average citations per HCP for each author.

In terms of the number of HCPs, Dewaele JM from Birkbeck Univ London tops the list with 7 HCPs with total citations of 492 (TC = 492), followed by Li C from Huazhong Univ Sci & Technol (#HCPs = 5; TC = 215) and Saito K from UCL (#HCPs = 5; TC = 576). It is to be noted that both Li C and Saito K have close academic collaborations with Dewaele JM . For example, 3 of the 5 HCPs by Li C are co-authored with Dewaele JM . The topics in their co-authored HCPs are mostly about foreign language learning emotions such as boredom , anxiety , enjoyment , the measurement , and positive psychology .

In regards to TC, Li, W . from UCL stands out as the most influential scholar among all the listed authors with total citations of 956 from 2 HCPs, followed by Norton B from Univ British Columbia (TC = 915) and Vasishth S from Univ Potsdam (TC = 694). The average citations per HCP from them are also the highest among the listed authors (478, 305, 347, respectively). It is important to note that Li, W.’ s 2 HCPs are his groundbreaking works on translanguaging which almost become must-reads for anyone who engages in translanguaging research ( Li, 2011 , 2018 ). Besides, Li, W. single authors his 2 HCPs, which is extremely rare as HCPs are often the results from multiple researchers. Norton B ’s HCPs are exploring some core issues in applied linguistics such as identity and investment , language learning , and social change that are considered the foundational work in its field ( Norton and Toohey, 2011 ; Darvin and Norton, 2015 ).

From the perspective of FA/CA papers, Li C from Huazhong Univ Sci and Technol is prominent because she is the first author of all her 5 HCPs. Her research on language learning emotions in the Chinese context is gaining widespread recognition ( Li et al., 2018 , 2019 , 2021 ; Li, 2019 , 2021 ). However, as a newly emerging researcher, most of her HCPs are published in the very recent years and hence accumulate relatively fewer citations (TC = 215). Mondada L from Univ Basel follows closely and single authors her 3 HCPs. Her work is mostly devoted to conversation analysis , multimodality , and social interaction ( Mondada, 2016 , 2018 , 2019 ).

We need to mention the following points regarding the productive authors of HCPs. First, when we calculated the number of HCPs from each author, only the papers published in the journals indexed in the investigated WoS categories were taken in account ( linguistics; language & linguistics ), which came as a compromise to protect the linguistics oriented nature of the HCPs. For example, Brysbaert M from Ghent University claimed a total of 8 HCPs at the time of the data retrieval, of which 6 HCPs were published in WoS category of psychology and more psychologically oriented, hence not included in our study. Besides, all the authors on the author list were treated equally when we calculated the number of HCPs, disregarding the author ordering. That implies that some influential authors may not be able to enter the list as their publications are comparatively fewer. Second, as some authors reported different affiliations at their different career stages, we only provide their most recent affiliation for convenience. Third, it is highly competitive to have one’s work selected as HCPs. The fact that a majority of the HCPs authors do not appear in our productive author list does not diminish their great contributions to this field. The rankings in Table 3 does not necessarily reflect the recognition authors have earned in academia at large.

4.3. Productive countries of HCPs

In total, the 143 HCPs originated from 33 countries. The most productive countries that contributed at least three HCPs are listed in Table 4 . The USA took an overwhelming lead with 59 HCPs, followed distantly by England with 31 HCPs. They also boasted the highest total citations (TC = 15,770; TC = 9,840), manifesting their high productivity and strong influence as traditional powerhouses in linguistics research. In regards to the average citations per HCP, Germany , England and the USA were the top three countries (TC/HCP = 281.67, 281.14, and 267.29, respectively). Although China held the third position with 19 HCPs published, its TC/HCP is the third from the bottom (TC/HCP = 66.84). One of the important reasons is that 13 out of the 19 HCPs contributed by scholars in China are published in the year of 2020 or 2021. The newly published HCPs may need more time to accumulate citations. Besides, 18 out of the 19 HCPs in China are first author and/or corresponding authors, indicating that scholars in China are becoming more independent and gaining more voice in English linguistics research.

Top 18 countries with at least 3 HCPs.

Two points should be noted here as to the productive countries. First, we calculated the HCP contributions from the country level instead of the region level. In other words, HCP contributions from different regions of the same country will be combined in the calculation. For example, HCPs from Scotland were added to the HCPs from England . HCPs from Hong Kong , Macau , and Taiwan are put together with the HCPs from Mainland China . In this way, a clear picture of the HCPs on the country level can be painted. Second, we manually checked the address information of the first author and corresponding author for each HCP. There are some cases where the first author or the corresponding author may report affiliations from more than one country. In this case, every country in their address list will be treated equally in the FA/CA calculation. In other word, a HCP may be classified into more than one country because of the different country backgrounds of the first and/or the corresponding author.

4.4. Top 20 HCPs

The top 20 HCPs with the highest normed citations are listed in decreasing order in Table 5 . The top cited publications can guide us to better understand the development and research topics in recent years.

Top 20 HCPs.

To save space, not full information about the HCPs is given. Some article titles have been abbreviated if they are too lengthy; for the authors, we report the first two authors and use “et al” if there are three authors or more; RC: raw citations; NC: normalized citations

By reading the titles and the abstracts of these top HCPs, we categorized the topics of the 20 HCPs into the following five groups: (i) statistical and analytical methods in (psycho)linguistics such as sentimental analysis, sentence simplification techniques, effect sizes, linear mixed models (#1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 14), (ii) language learning/teaching emotions such enjoyment, anxiety, boredom, stress (#11, 15, 16, 18, 19), (iii) translanguaging or multilinguilism (#5, 13, 20, 17), (iv) language perception (#2, 7, 10), (v) medium of instruction (#8, 12). It is no surprise that 6 out of the top 20 HCPs are about statistical methods in linguistics because language researchers aspire to employ statistics to make their research more scientific. Besides, we noticed that the papers on language teaching/learning emotions on the list are all published in the year of 2020 and 2021, indicating that these emerging topics may deserve more attention in future research. We also noticed two Covid-19 related articles (#16, 19) explored the emotions teachers and students experience during the pandemic, a timely response to the urgent need of the language learning and teaching community.

It is of special interest to note that papers from the journals indexed in multiple JCR categories seem to accumulate more citations. For example, Journal of Memory and Language , American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology , and Computational Linguistics are indexed both in SSCI and SCIE and contribute the top 4 HCPs, manifesting the advantage of these hybrid journals in amassing citations compared to the conventional language journals. Besides, different to findings from Yan et al. (2022) that most of the top HCPs in the field of radiology are reviews in document types, 19 out of the top 20 HCPs are research articles instead of reviews except Macaro et al. (2018) .

4.5. Most frequently explored topics of HCPs

After obtaining the corpus based topic items, we read all the titles and abstracts of the 143 HCPs to further validate their roles as research topics. Table 6 presents the top research topics with the observed frequency of 5 or above. We grouped these topics into five broad categories: bilingual-related, language learning/teaching-related, psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related, methods and tools-related, and others . The observed frequency count for each topic in the abstract corpus were included in the brackets. We found that about 34 of the 143 HCPs are exploring bilingual related issues, the largest share among all the categorized topics, testifying its academic popularity in the examined timespan. Besides, 30 of the 143 HCPs are investigating language learning/teaching-related issues, with topics ranging from learners (e.g., EFL learners, individual difference) to multiple learning variables (e.g., learning strategy, motivation, agency). The findings here will be validated by the analysis of the keywords.

Categorization of the most explored research topics.

N: the number of the HCPs in each topic category; ELF: English as a lingua franca; CLIL: content and language integrated learning; FLE: foreign language enjoyment; FLCA: foreign language classroom anxiety

Several points should be mentioned regarding the topic candidacy. First, for similar topic expressions, we used a cover term and added the frequency counts. For example, multilingualism is a cover term for bilinguals, bilingualism, plurilingualism, and multilingualism . Second, for nouns of singular and plural forms (e.g., emotion and emotions ) or for items with different spellings (e.g., meta analysis and meta analyses ), we combined the frequency counts. Third, we found that some longer items (3 grams and 4 grams) could be subsumed to short ones (2 grams or monogram) without loss of essential meaning (e.g., working memory from working memory capacity ). In this case, the shorter ones were kept for their higher frequency. Fourth, some highly frequent terms were discarded because they were too general to be valuable topics in language research, for example, applied linguistics , language use , second language .

5. Discussion and implications

Based on 143 highly cited papers collected from the WoS categories of linguistics , the present study attempts to present a bird’s eye view of the publication landscape and the most updated research themes reflected from the HCPs in the linguistics field. Specifically, we investigated the important contributors of HCPs in terms of journals, authors and countries. Besides, we spotlighted the research topics by corpus-based analysis of the abstracts and a detailed analysis of the top HCPs. The study has produced several findings that bear important implications.

The first finding is that the HCPs are highly concentrated in a limited journals and countries. In regards to journals, those in the spheres of bilingualism and applied linguistics (e.g., language teaching and learning) are likely to accumulate more citations and hence to produce more HCPs. Journals that focus on bilingualism from a linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific perspective are the most frequent outlets of HCPs as evidenced by the top two productive journals of HCPs, Bilingualism Language and Cognition and International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism . This can be explained by the multidisciplinary nature of bilingual-related research and the development of cognitive measurement techniques. The merits of analyzing publication venues of HCPs are two folds. One the one hand, it can point out which sources of high-quality publications in this field can be inquired for readers as most of the significant and cutting-edge achievements are concentrated in these prestigious journals. On the other hand, it also provides essential guidance or channels for authors or contributors to submit their works for higher visibility.

In terms of country distributions, the traditional powerhouses in linguistics research such as the USA and England are undoubtedly leading the HCP publications in both the number and the citations of the HCPs. However, developing countries are also becoming increasing prominent such as China and Iran , which could be traceable in the funding and support of national language policies and development policies as reported in recent studies ( Ping et al., 2009 ; Lei and Liu, 2019 ). Take China as an example. Along with economic development, China has given more impetus to academic outputs with increased investment in scientific research ( Lei and Liao, 2017 ). Therefore, researchers in China are highly motivated to publish papers in high-quality journals to win recognition in international academia and to deal with the publish or perish pressure ( Lee, 2014 ). These factors may explain the rise of China as a new emerging research powerhouse in both natural and social sciences, including English linguistics research.

The second finding is the multilingual trend in linguistics research. The dominant clustering of topics regarding multilingualism can be understood as a timely response to the multilingual research fever ( May, 2014 ). 34 out of the 143 HCPs have such words as bilingualism, bilingual, multilingualism , translanguaging , etc., in their titles, reflecting a strong multilingual tendency of the HCPs. Multilingual-related HCPs mainly involve three aspects: multilingualism from the perspectives of psycholinguistics and cognition (e.g., Luk et al., 2011 ; Leivada et al., 2020 ); multilingual teaching (e.g., Schissel et al., 2018 ; Ortega, 2019 ; Archila et al., 2021 ); language policies related to multilingualism (e.g., Shen and Gao, 2018 ). As a pedagogical process initially used to describe the bilingual classroom practice and also a frequently explored topic in HCPs, translanguaging is developed into an applied linguistics theory since Li’s Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language ( Li, 2018 ). The most common collocates of translanguaging in the Abstract corpus are pedagogy/pedagogies, practices, space/spaces . There are two main reasons for this multilingual turn. First, the rapid development of globalization, immigration, and overseas study programs greatly stimulate the use and research of multiple languages in different linguistic contexts. Second, in many non-English countries, courses are delivered through languages (mostly English) besides their mother tongue ( Clark, 2017 ). Students are required to use multiple languages as resources to learn and understand subjects and ideas. The burgeoning body of English Medium Instruction literature in higher education is in line with the rising interest in multilingualism. Due to the innate multidisciplinary nature, it is to be expected that, multilingualism, the topic du jour, is bound to attract more attention in the future.

The third finding is the application of Positive Psychology (PP) in second language acquisition (SLA), that is, the positive trend in linguistic research. In our analysis, 20 out of 143 HCPs have words or phrases such as emotions, enjoyment, boredom, anxiety , and positive psychology in their titles, which might signal a shift of interest in the psychology of language learners and teachers in different linguistic environments. Our study shows Foreign language enjoyment (FLE) is the most frequently explored emotion, followed by foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), the learners’ metaphorical left and right feet on their journey to acquiring the foreign language ( Dewaele and MacIntyre, 2016 ). In fact, the topics of PP are not entirely new to SLA. For example, studies of language motivations, affections, and good language learners all provide roots for the emergence of PP in SLA ( Naiman, 1978 ; Gardner, 2010 ). In recent years, both research and teaching applications of PP in SLA are building rapidly, with a diversity of topics already being explored such as positive education and PP interventions. It is to be noted that SLA also feeds back on PP theories and concepts besides drawing inspirations from it, which makes it “an area rich for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of ideas” ( Macintyre et al., 2019 ).

It should be noted that subjectivity is involved when we decide and categorize the candidate topic items based on the Abstract corpus. However, the frequency and range criteria guarantee that these items are actually more explored in multiple HCPs, thus indicating topic values for further investigation. Some high frequent n-grams are abandoned because they are too general or not meaningful topics. For example, applied linguistics is too broad to be included as most of the HCPs concern issues in this research line instead of theoretical linguistics. By meaningful topics, we mean that the topics can help journal editors and readers quickly locate their interested fields ( Lei and Liu, 2019 ), as the author keywords such as bilingualism , emotions , and individual differences . The examination of the few 3/4-grams and monograms (mostly nouns) revealed that most of them were either not meaningful topics or they could be subsumed in the 2-grams. Besides, there is inevitably some overlapping in the topic categorizations. For example, some topics in the language teaching and learning category are situated and discussed within the context of multilingualism. The merits of topic categorizations are two folds: to better monitor the overlapping between the Abstract corpus-based topic items and the keywords; to roughly delineate the research strands in the HCPs for future research.

It should also be noted that all the results were based on the retrieved HCPs only. The study did not aim to paint a comprehensive and full picture of the whole landscape of linguistic research. Rather, it specifically focused on the most popular literature in a specified timeframe, thus generating the snapshots or trends in linguistic research. One of the important merits of this methodology is that some newly emerging but highly cited researchers can be spotlighted and gain more academic attention because only the metrics of HCPs are considered in calculation. On the contrary, the exclusion of some other highly cited researchers in general such as Rod Ellis and Ken Hyland just indicates that their highly cited publications are not within our investigated timeframe and cannot be interpreted as their diminishing academic influence in the field. Besides, the study does not consider the issue of collaborators or collaborations in calculating the number of HCPs for two reasons. First, although some researchers are regular collaborators such as Li CC and Dewaele JM, their individual contribution can never be undermined. Second, the study also provides additional information about the number of the FA/CA HCPs from each listed author, which may aid readers in locating their interested research.

We acknowledge that our study has some limitations that should be addressed in future research. First, our study focuses on the HCPs extracted from WoS SSCI and A&HCI journals, the alleged most celebrated papers in this field. Future studies may consider including data from other databases such as Scopus to verify the findings of the present study. Second, our Abstract corpus-based method for topic extraction involved human judgement. Although the final list was the result of several rounds of discussions among the authors, it is difficult or even impossible to avoid subjectivity and some worthy topics may be unconsciously missed. Therefore, future research may consider employing automatic algorithms to extract topics. For example, a dependency-based machine learning approach can be used to identify research topics ( Zhu and Lei, 2021 ).

Data availability statement

Author contributions.

SY: conceptualization and methodology. SY and LZ: writing-review and editing and writing-original draft. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Fund of China MOE under the grant 20YJC740076 and 18YJC740141.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1052586/full#supplementary-material

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University Library

Linguistics Library Guide: All Journals A-Z

• Research Methods
• Reference Works
• Linguistics Corpora
• Second Language Acquisition
• Journals A-D
• Journals E-J
• Journals L-R
• Journals S-Z
• All Journals A-Z

Linguistics Journals (A-B)

• Acta Linguistica Hafniensa Acta Linguistica Hafniensa is an international journal of linguistics, published by the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen. Articles are in English, French, and German.
• ADFL Bulletin The Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL) Bulletin is a refereed journal published two times a year by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages, a subsidiary of the Modern Language Association. Articles are in English.
• American Journal of Semiotics The American Journal of Semiotics, the journal of the Semiotic Society of America, is a peer-reviewed research publication with an interdisciplinary focus on the general subject of signs and sign systems. Articles are in English.
• Annual Review of Applied Linguistics The Annual Review of Applied Linguistics publishes research on key topics in the broad field of applied linguistics. Each issue is thematic, providing a variety of perspectives on the topic through research summaries, critical overviews, position papers and empirical studies. Articles are in English.
• Applied Linguistics Applied Linguistics, published by Oxford University Press, publishes research into language, with a focus on real-world problems. Applied Linguistics is interested in making connections between fields, theories, research methods, and scholarly discourses. Articles are in English.
• Asian Englishes Asian Englishes: an international journal of the sociolinguistics of English in Asia/Pacific is directed at the diffusion of English and its diversification in Asia and the Pacific. Articles are in English.
• Australian Journal of Linguistics The Australian Journal of Linguistics is the official journal of the Australian Linguistic Society. The Journal publishes all branches of linguistics, with preference given to articles of theoretical interest. Articles have an international focus, but the journal also encourages articles on Australian languages, Australian English, and language in Australian society. Articles are in English.
• Babel Babel is designed for translators, interpreters, and terminologists, but is also a good way for non-specialists to keep up with current issues and events in the field. Babel is published for the International Federation of Translators. Articles are in English, French, Arabic, Chinese, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish.
• Le Banque des Mots (The Bank of Words) Le Banque des Mots is a journal published by the Conseil international de la langue française (International Council for the French Language), and specializes in the questions raised by the continuing development of scientific and other terminologies. Articles are in French.

Linguistics Journals (C-D)

• CALICO CALICO Journal is the official publication of the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) and focuses on information concerning the application of technology to language teaching and language learning. Articles are in English.
• CLA Journal CLA Journal is the College Language Association Journal. CLAJ encourages the publication of socially engaged, innovative, and groundbreaking scholarship in language, literature, linguistics, and pedagogy. Articles are primarily in English, but have no published restrictions on submission languages and JSTOR describes CLAJ as "multilingual."
• CLS - Comparative Literature Studies CLS, or Comparative Literature Studies, is published by Pennsylvania State University Press. It publishes comparative articles in literature and culture, critical theory, and cultural and literary relations within and beyond the Western tradition, and every two years an issue focuses entirely on East-West literary and cultural concerns. Articles are in English.
• Cognitive Linguistics Cognitive Linguistics publishes research on the interaction between language and cognition. The journal focuses on significant advancements to the theory or methods of cognitive linguistics, and unknown or understudied phenomena in cognitive linguistics. Articles are in English.
• Computer Assisted Language Learning CALL is an interdisciplinary journal which concerns itself with the use of computers in language learning (L1 and L2), teaching and testing. Articles are in English.
• Computer Speech and Language Computer Speech and Language publishes research on recognition, understanding, production, coding and mining of speech and language. Often, this research is performed by individuals in artificial intelligence, computer science, electronic engineering, information retrieval, linguistics, phonetics, or psychology. The journal encourages an interdisciplinary approach to speech and language research and technology. Articles are in English.
• Constructions and Frames Constructions and Frames, an international journal published by the John Benjamins Publishing Company, focuses on construction-based approaches to language analysis. Articles are in English.
• Diachronica Diachronica, the International Journal for Historical Linguistics, is published by the John Benjamins Publishing Company. The journal publishes articles focusing on aspects of language change in any and all languages of the globe. Articles are in English, French, German, and Spanish.
• Dialectologia et Geolinguistica The Journal of the International Society for Dialectology and Geolinguistics, also known as Dialectologia et Geolinguistica, publishes contributions on the variation of languages world-wide, systematic and inherent, diachronic and synchronic, regional and social, based on either oral or written data. Articles are primarily in English and German, but the journal is multilingual.
• Dictionaries Dictionaries is the journal of the Dictionary Society of North America. The journal publishes articles focusing on lexicography, as well as areas of linguistics inquiry related to lexicography, and reference works in general related to dictionary-making. Articles are primarily in English, but do not appear to have submission restrictions and articles in French are apparent.
• Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (formerly Literary and Linguistic Computing) Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (formerly Literary and Linguistic Computing) is the Journal of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. From the publisher: "The first issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing (1986) published papers on authorship, style, meaning, text processing, linguistics, and lexicometrics. In 2015, the festive celebratory 30th volume of the Journal will publish papers on oral history, film, ontologies, digital collections, and data modelling next to other papers of a more literary and linguistic nature." Articles are in English.

Linguistics Journals (E-I)

• English Today English Today focuses on the English language and all aspects of it, including style, usage, dictionaries, literary language, Plain English, the Internet and language teaching. It discusses topics in terms of British, American and the world’s many other Englishes. The journal targets linguists, journalists, broadcasters, writers, publishers, teachers, students of the language and anyone with a professional or personal interest in communication. Articles are in English.
• English World-Wide English World-Wide focuses on scholarly discussion of new findings related to the dialectology and sociolinguistics of the English-speaking communities (native and second-language speakers). It is also interested in general problems of variationist, general and historical sociolinguistics, pidgin and creole linguistics, language planning, and multilingualism. Modern historical sociolinguistics are included when they have a direct bearing on modern varieties of English. Articles are in English.
• Esperanto Esperanto is the periodical published by the Universal Esperanto Association. It showcases events related to Esperanto, latest published research, opinions, analyses, and decisions. Articles are in Esperanto.
• Folia Linguistica (&Historica) Both Folia Linguistica and Folia Linguistica Historica are journals of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE). Each volume consists of two issues of Folia Linguistica, one issue of Folia Linguistica Historica, and one Special Issue. Folia Linguistica is devoted to empirically based linguistic topics and covers all non-historical areas in the traditional disciplines of general linguistics. FL focuses on sociological, discoursal, computational and psychological aspects of language and linguistic theory. Other areas of central concern are grammaticalization, language typology, and variation within and across languages. Folia Linguistica Historica is exclusively devoted to empirically based diachronic linguistics of all language families (including both historical and comparative linguistics). Guidelines for submission do not appear to have language limitations. Articles appear in English, French, German, and Italian.
• Forum for Modern Language Studies The Forum for Modern Language Studies publishes articles addressing Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish, from the Middle Ages to the present day. The journal attempts to reflect the essential pluralism of research in modern languages and to provide a forum for worldwide scholarly discussion. Also included are submissions in comparative literature, theoretical linguistics, as well as those dealing with visual art, film and the performing arts. Articles are in English.
• Grazer Linguistische Studien Grazer linguistische Studien (Graz Linguistic Studies) is the journal for linguistic research, primarily related to ongoing research at the University of Graz. Articles are in German.
• Historiographia Linguistica Historiographia Linguistica is concerned with the history of sciences relating to language, including linguistics, philology, anthropology, sociology, pedagogy, psychology, neurology, and other disciplines. The central objectives are to present the origin and development of particular ideas, concepts, methods, schools of thought or trends, and the discussion of the methodological and philosophical foundations of a historiography of the language sciences, including its relationship with the history and philosophy of science. Articles are in English, French, German, and occasionally other languages.
• IALLT Journal of Language Learning Technologies The IALLT Journal of Language Learning Technologies is a publication of the International Association for Language Learning Technology. It is focused on research and review articles related to technology with respect to language teaching, learning, and or/research. The majority of the submissions are case study ethnographies, quasi-experimental classroom research or emerging technology reviews. Articles are in English.
• Intercultural Pragmatics Intercultural Pragmatics focuses on theoretical and applied pragmatics research. The journal promotes the development and understanding of pragmatic theory and intercultural competence. It makes an effort to cross disciplinary boundaries between anthropology, theoretical and applied linguistics, psychology, communication, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and bi- and multilingualism. Articles are in English.
• International Journal of American Linguistics The IJAL focuses on American Indigenous languages of North and South America. Articles are in English and Spanish.
• International Journal of Lexicography IJL is concerned with topics in lexicography, including issues of design, compilation and use, and with dictionaries of all languages, though the chief focus is on dictionaries of the major European languages, monolingual and bilingual, synchronic and diachronic, pedagogical and encyclopedic. Articles in French, German, and English.
• International Journal of the Sociology of Language The International Journal of the Society of Language focuses on the development of the sociology of language as an international and interdisciplinary field. The hope is that different approaches, both theoretical and empirical will supplement and complement each other, leading to the growth of language-related knowledge, applications, values and sensitivities. Articles are in English, French, Spanish, German, and occasionally Italian.
• International Review of Pragmatics The International Review of Pragmatics, published by Brill, publishes on pragmatics and related disciplines related to any aspect of human communication, both verbal and non-verbal. No language restrictions on the submission guidelines, but articles appear in English.
• Issues in Applied Linguistics : IAL Issues in Applied Linguistics is published by the graduate students of the UCLA Department of Applied Linguistics & TESL. They are interested in Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Language Acquisition, Language Analysis, Language Assessment, Language Education, Language Use, Language Evolution, Neurobiology of Language, and Research Methodology. Articles appear to be in English.

Linguistics Journals (J)

• Journal of African Cultural Studies The Journal of African Cultural Studies focuses on various aspects of African culture, including oral and written literature, performance and visual arts, music, cinema, the role of the media, the relationship between culture and power, as well as issues within popular culture in Africa, sociolinguistic topics of cultural interest, and culture and gender. Articles are in English.
• Journal of African Languages and Linguistics The Journal of African Languages and Linguistics encourages original contributions on all aspects of African language studies, synchronic as well as diachronic, theoretical as well as data-oriented. The journal also lists recently published books on African languages and linguistics. Articles are in English and French.
• Journal of Asian Pacific Communication The Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, published by the John Benjamins Publishing Company, focuses on discussing and interpreting language in communication issues as they pertain to people of Asian Pacific regions and in their immigrant communities worldwide. The journal is dedicated to interdisciplinary approaches to language in communication studies. Submission guidelines do not restrict to English, but require an English abstract. All articles appear to be in English.
• Journal of Chinese Linguistics The Journal of Chinese Linguistics is an academic journal mainly in English, and includes research from both general linguistics and Chinese linguistics (Languages in China). JCL publishes on a variety of general linguistic areas such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Articles are in English and Chinese (all Chinese articles have English abstracts).
• Journal of Chinese Linguistics (Monograph Series) The Journal of Chinese Linguistics, monograph series, is focused on general linguistics and Chinese linguistics covering languages in China. It is published by Chinese University Press on behalf of Project on Linguistic Analysis. JCLMS has a singular theme for each volume, currently published annually. Articles are primarily in Chinese, with English abstracts.
• Journal of Greek Linguistics descriptive and theoretical study of the Greek language from its roots in Ancient Greek down to present-day dialects and varieties, including those spoken in Asia Minor, Cyprus, Tsakonia, and the Greek diaspora. Articles are in English.
• Journal of Historical Pragmatics The Journal of Historical Pragmatics, published by the John Benjamins Publishing Company, provides an interdisciplinary forum for theoretical, empirical and methodological work at the intersection of pragmatics and historical linguistics. The focus is on the "socio-historical and pragmatic aspects of historical texts in the sociocultural context of communication (e.g. conversational principles, politeness strategies, or speech acts) and on diachronic pragmatics as seen in linguistic processes such as grammaticalization or discoursization." Articles are in English.
• Journal of Indo-European Studies The Journal of Indo-European Studies focuses on the origin and evolution of the Indo-European language family and the anthropology, archaeology, mythology and general cultural history of the Indo-European-speaking peoples. Submission guidelines do not restrict language.
• Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict The Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict focuses on new tools and methods to investigate and better understand the language of aggression and conflict. JLAC is multidisciplinary in nature and encourages, debate among researchers representing different fields including, but not limited to, linguistics, communication, psychology, anthropology, bi- and multilingualism, business management, second language acquisition, gender studies. Articles are in English.
• Journal of Language Contact The Journal of Language Contact focuses on the study of language contact, use, and change. This involves linguistic, anthropological, historical, and cognitive factors. Submission guidelines do not restrict language, but articles appear to be in English.
• Journal of Linguistics The Journal of Linguistics focuses on clear contributions to the conversations about all branches of theoretical linguistics. It provides surveys of recent linguistics publications, including book reviews and review articles on major works on theoretical advances. Articles are in English.
• Journal of Literary Semantics The Journal of Literary Semantics focuses on research into the relations between linguistics and literature. It concentrates the work of theoretical linguistics on what are traditionally considered "literary" texts. Its readership includes theoretical and applied linguists, narratologists, poeticians, philosophers and psycholinguists. JLS publishes articles on all aspects of literary semantics, broadly including the study of literature as it relates to other disciplines such as psychology, neurophysiology, mathematics, and history, as well as articles dealing with the educational problems inherent in the study of literature. Articles are in English.
• Journal of Phonetics The Journal of Phonetics publishes experimental or theoretical research that relates to the phonetic aspects of language and linguistic communication processes. Submissions on technological and/or pathological topics, or interdisciplinary papers, are also accepted as long as linguistic-phonetic principles support the work. Articles are in English.
• Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages The Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (JPCL) focuses on the scholarly study of pidgins, creoles, and other contact language varieties. It has special emphasis on research on empirical description, theoretical issues, and broad implications for theories of language acquisitions and change, and linguistic theory in general. The editors also encourage explorations of the application of linguistic research to language planning, education, and social reform. Articles are in English.
• Journal of Politeness Research The Journal of Politeness Research, associated with the international Linguistic Politeness Research Group (LPRG) focuses on aspects of politeness as a complex linguistic and non-linguistic phenomenon. Its multidisciplinary approach provides a forum for interconnections between researchers approaching politeness from different disciplinary angles. The journal opens the existing body of research by encouraging contributions from lesser-studied cultures and languages. Articles are in English.
• Journal of Pragmatics The Journal of Pragmatics brings together a wide range of research in the branches of pragmatics, including cognitive pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, historical pragmatics, interpersonal pragmatics, multimodal pragmatics, sociopragmatics, theoretical pragmatics and related fields. Articles are in English.
• Journal of Second Language Pronunciation The Journal of Second Language Pronunciation focuses on the acquisition, perception, production, teaching, assessment, and description of prosodic and segmental pronunciation of second languages in every context of learning. The journal encourages research that bridges theory and practice, increases understanding of second language phonological learning processes, and connects second language pronunciation and other areas of applied linguistics. Articles are in English.
• Journal of Semantics The Journal of Semantics focuses on formal and experimental methods on the study of meaning. It welcomes submissions on semantics, pragmatics, the syntax/semantics interface, cross-linguistic semantics, experimental studies of meaning (processing, acquisition, and neurolinguistics), and semantically-informed philosophy of language. Articles are in English.
• Journal of the International Phonetic Association The Journal of the International Phonetic Association (JIPA) focuses on research on phonetic theory and description and their phonological, typological ,and broader implications. JIPA encourages submissions from well-known and underdocumented linguistic varieties (minority and endangered languages). JIPA also welcomes research on phonetics, laboratory phonology, practical applications of phonetics to areas such as phonetics teaching, speech therapy, and computer speech processing, provided the focus of such submissions is primarily linguistic in nature. JIPA is especially concerned with the theory behind the International Phonetic Alphabet, and publishes online audio files to supplement the text of the Illustrations and encourages the submission of such supplementary materials for all contributions, including the submission of manuscripts with embedded audio files. Articles are primarily in English, but contributions in what they call "languages of wide scholarly currency" may also be accepted.

Linguistics Journals L

• LACUS Forum LACUS, the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States, was founded to create a forum for the free flow of ideas and discussion on communication going beyond traditional grammatical studies in the various traditional modes.It focuses on all facets of the study of language, and is more concerned with its generality and interdisciplinary interests than any specialization. Articles are in English and French.
• La Linguistique La Linguistique is the official publication of the Société Internationale de Linguistique Fonctionnelle (SILF: International Society of Functional Linguistics). Its primary concern is on the general linguistics perspective, focusing on the most diverse languages and applies to all areas within the discipline. This includes phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicology, enunciation, pragmatics, discourse analysis, language teaching, language acquisition and pathology, sociolinguistics, language variation and dynamics, diachrony, typology, semiology, translation, etc. Articles are in French, with some translated into English.
• Language & Communication Language & Communication casts a broad net over the interdisciplinary study of language and communication. Research on language and its functions is common to those working in applied linguistics, child development, cultural studies, discourse analysis, intellectual history, legal studies, language evolution, linguistic anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, the politics of language, pragmatics, psychology, rhetoric, semiotics, and sociolinguistics. Articles are in English.
• Language and Linguistics Compass Language and Linguistics Compass combine original research and analysis with a broader expertise and understanding of how it fits—as both contribution and intervention—in the authors’ fields or sub-fields. The articles must deal with research research in the field, a comparative look across boundaries, or address the state of the field. Subjects can include: cognitive science, comparative, compass, computational, education, historical, language, linguistics, mathematical, morphology, pedagogy, phonetics, phonology, pragmatics, semantics, sociolinguistics, syntax, typology. Articles are in English.
• Language Dynamics and Change The Language Dynamics and Change (LDC) welcomes submissions on all aspects of historical linguistics, including those that bridge the gap between historical linguistics and other relevant disciplines, such as the study of human evolution, archaeology, genetics, and computational modeling. Articles are in English.
• Language in Society Language in Society is a sociolinguistics journal focused on language and discourse as aspects of social life. It publishes empirical articles of general theoretical, comparative, or methodological interest for scholars in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and related fields. Articles are in English.
• Language Learning Journal The Language Learning Journal is the Journal of the Association for Language Learning. Its focus is on scholarly contributions to current aspects of foreign language and teaching. Its readership includes foreign language teachers, language teacher educators, researchers and policy makers. Articles are in English.
• Language Problems & Language Planning Language Problems and Language Planning (LPLP) is a multilingual journal devoted to the study of multilingualism and language policy. LPLP encourages interdisciplinary approaches to the study of multilingualism and language policy, and those from language disciplines and social sciences (including political science, sociology, economics, education sciences, psychology, philosophy, history, law, etc.) are welcome, with a priority for papers offering a strong analytical orientation (whether theoretical, empirical, methodological, or a combination of these). Articles are accepted in any language.
• Languages Languages is focused on any discipline with an interest in language sciences-- including syntax, lexicon, morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, rhetoric, semiotics, stylistics, typology, acquisition, pathology, socio-linguistics, cognition, and automatic processing. Articles are in French.
• Language Teaching Language Teaching is devoted to providing research in the field of second-language instruction and learning to language professionals. It offers critical survey articles of recent research on specific topics, second and foreign languages and countries, and invites original research articles reporting on replication studies and meta-analyses. Articles are in English.
• Language Variation and Change Language Variation and Change is focused exclusively on linguistic variation and the capacity to deal with the systematic and inherent variation in synchronic and diachronic linguistics. Language Variation and Change concentrates on the details of linguistic structure in actual speech production and processing (or writing), including contemporary or historical sources. Articles are primarily in English, but articles in French are also accepted.

• Lingua Lingua publishes articles from all linguistic disciplines, not only general linguistics (i.e. phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics) but also philosophy of language, rhetoric, historical linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. Lingua is open to both data-driven and theoretical submissions that contribute to the understanding of diverse linguistic constructs and communicative phenomena. Articles are in English.
• The Linguist: Journal of the Institute of Linguists The Linguist is the professional journal of the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL). The journal keeps readers up to date on CIOL news and reports on the activities of its Special Interest Groups and regional networks, as well as publishing a range of articles of interest to language professionals and anyone interested in languages. Articles are primarily in English.
• Linguistica Atlantica: Journal of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association Linguistica Atlantica is the journal of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association. The first thirteen volumes were published as the Journal of the Provinces Linguistic Association. LA publishes articles on descriptive and theoretical linguistics. Articles are in English and French.
• Linguisticae Investigationes Lingvisticæ Investigationes focuses on the lexicon, grammar, phonology, and semantics. It prefers studies that can be integrated into text analysis software, and studies that describe resources such as grammars and electronic dictionaries constructed on a linguistic basis. The journal also publishes bibliographies, summaries of theses, reports, squibs and reviews. Contributions are in English and French.
• Linguistic Analysis Linguistic Analysis is a journal that publishes on phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. It prepares various issues focused on special topics, like Chinese syntax, morphology, and phonology of Semitic languages. Articles are in English.
• The Linguistic Review The Linguistic Review focuses on publishing on phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, within a framework of Generative Grammar and related disciplines. It also publishes critical discussions of theoretical linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology. Articles are in English.
• Linguistics Linguistics publishes articles and book reviews in traditional subdisciplines of linguistics and neighboring disciplines, including grammar (functional/formal), with a focus on morphology, syntax, and sematics, pragmatics and discourse, phonetics and phonology, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Perspective can be synchronic or diachronic, and can focus on one or more languages. Studies with a wide crosslinguistic (typological) coverage are also welcome. Articles are in English.
• Linguistics and Education Linguistics and Education publishes research on the knowledge, theory, or methodology at the intersections of linguistics and education. It focuses on the role of language (and other communicative or semiotic systems) in opportunities for learning and participating in a globalized world. It encourages submissions from disciplines like: sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, linguistic anthropology, ethnography of communication, language socialization, narrative studies, gesture/sign/visual forms of communication, social semiotics, literacy studies, language policy, language ideology, functional grammar or text/corpus linguistics. Articles are in English.
• Linguistics and Philosophy Linguistics and Philosophy is a publication that focuses on issues related to structure and meaning in natural language as addressed in the philosophy of language, linguistic semantics, syntax and related disciplines. Articles are in English.
• Linguistics in the Netherlands Linguistics in the Netherlands is sponsored by the Dutch Linguistics Association (Algemene Vereniging voor Taalwetenschap). Each issue contains papers presented at the annual meeting of the society, and presents an overview of research in different fields of linguistics in the Netherlands containing articles on phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Articles are in English.
• Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area is concerned with the synchronic and diachronic study of Southeastern Asian languages. It publishes articles on Tibeto-Burman and on the languages belonging to all the major linguistic families of Southeast Asia, including Austroasiatic, Hmong-Mien, Indo-Aryan and Tai-Kadai. Article guidelines do not prohibit non-English submissions, but English is the most predominantly used.
• Linguistic Typology Linguistic Typology focuses on all works related to the study of linguistic typology, cross-linguistic variation, works taking a typological perspective on the structure of spoken and signed languages-- including historical change, language processing, and sociolinguistics. Descriptive and theoretical frameworks are welcome, as long as they have clear relevance to the study of cross-linguistic variation. Cross-disciplinary approaches to linguistic diversity that are typologically informed and theoretically correct are also welcome. Articles are in English.
• Linguistische Berichte Linguistische Berichte focuses on linguistic subjects and methods, and attaches great importance to theoretical reasoning and empirical validation. Subjects include psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, language acquisition and teaching, literary studies, philosophy, and computer linguistics. Articles are predominantly in German with some in English.
• Literary & Linguistic Computing (now Digital Scholarship in the Humanities) Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (formerly Literary and Linguistic Computing) is the Journal of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. From the publisher: "The first issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing (1986) published papers on authorship, style, meaning, text processing, linguistics, and lexicometrics. In 2015, the festive celebratory 30th volume of the Journal will publish papers on oral history, film, ontologies, digital collections, and data modelling next to other papers of a more literary and linguistic nature." Articles are in English.

Linguistics Journals M-R

• Mediterranean Language Review The Mediterranean Language Review focuses on the interdisciplinary investigation of language and culture throughout the Mediterranean, South-Eastern Europe, and the Black Sea area. The journal publishes articles, reviews, review articles, and bibliographical surveys on past and present Mediterranean languages. Topics include linguistic contact/diffusion in the region, the interaction between language and culture, sociolinguistic aspects like diglossia, bilingualism, and dialectology, the evolution of languages spoken by small nations and ethnic minorities, ethnolinguistic research, religion and language, linguistic stratification, interlinguas, maritime linguistics, and more. Articles are in English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian.
• Meeting Handbook The Meeting Handbook is the official program for the annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), the American Dialect Society (ADS), American Name Society (ANS), the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences (NAAHoLS), the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL), the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (SPCL), and the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA). Published in English, but may include titles in other languages.
• Modern Language Studies Modern Language Studies caters to the members of the Northeast Modern Language Association. It focuses on research in all areas of British, American, and comparative literatures, and literatures of modern languages. The journal publishes three sections of materials: articles, profession and pedagogy, and reviews. Submissions may include annotated and critically contextualized documents such as letters, unusual primary materials, and so on. Articles are predominantly in English, but there are no language restrictions for submissions.
• Multilingua Multilingua focuses on linguistic diversity in social life. It is interested in empirical, theoretically-grounded research from underrepresented sociolinguistic contexts worldwide. Topics of interest include bilingualism and multilingualism, language education, learning, and policy, inter- and cross-cultural communication, translation and interpretation in social context, sociolinguistic studies of language in globalization, transnationalism, migration, and mobility over time/space. Articles are in English.
• Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft = Munich Studies on Linguistics Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft, or, Munich Studies on Linguistics publishes on philology, languages in general, and linguistics. Articles are in German, French, and English.
• Nordic Journal of Linguistics. The Nordic Journal of Linguistics is a publication of Cambridge University Press for the Nordic Association of Linguistics. The journal publishes on all branches of linguistics, with special attention on issues relating to Nordic languages (Finnish, Greenlandic, and Saami), as well as issues of general theoretical interest. Articles are in English.
• NOWELE : North-Western European Language Evolution North-Western European Language Evolution (NOWELE) focuses on early and more recent history of a locally determined group of languages, and the study of purely theoretical questions concerning language development. NOWELE is interested in all aspects of the histories of, and with, intra- and extra-linguistic factors contributing to change and variation within: Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Frisian, Dutch, German, English, Gothic and the Early Runic language. Studies involving past and present neighboring languages including Celtic, Finnish, Lithuanian, Russian and French, in so far as these have played and are playing a role in the development or present status of north-western European languages through contact, are also welcome. Articles are in English and German.
• Onoma Onoma (after the Greek word for 'name') was historically focused on international onomastic bibliographies (1959-1996). From 1997 onward, it has expanded to topical research reports, articles, reviews of general and theoretical interest on all areas of scholarly name research. Articles are in English, French, German (abstracts are available in all three languages).
• Phonai Phonai focuses on linguistics, semiotics, phonetics, dialectology, and German particularly. Articles are in German.
• Phonetica Phonetica publishes interdisciplinary research on phonetics with a wide range of approaches, including instrumental measures, perceptual and neurocognitive procedures, and computational modelling, for investigating properties and principles of phonetics over any language. It crosses styles, types of language users, and modalities (speech, sign, song). Phonetica covers phonetic and phonological descriptions, articulatory and signal analytic measures of production, perception, acquisition, and phonetic variation and change. Articles are in English.
• Phonology Phonology focuses on all aspects of phonology, and encourages the exchange of ideas between phonologists and those working in related disciplines. Articles are in English.
• Pragmatics & Cognition Pragmatics & Cognition has an interdisciplinary focus, attempting to bring together linguistics, semiotics, cognitive science, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy, ethology, and cognitive anthropology, among others. It looks at semiotic systems used by humans, animals, and machines. Articles are in English.
• Pragmatics : Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association. Pragmatics is the journal of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), which was established to represent the field of linguistic pragmatics (conceived as the interdisciplinary science of language use). The journal encourages researchers of many backgrounds, whether linguistic, anthropological, sociological, psychological, computational, etc. Articles are in English.
• Probus Probus provides a forum for the discussion of dichronic and synchronic research for Romance linguistics. Probus has a special focus on phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and language acquisition. Articles are in English.
• Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes (RLV) focuses on work related to a variety of subfields of theoretical and formal linguistics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, typology, and poetics. As of issue 40 (2011), articles are by default published in English.
• RELC Journal RELC Journal is published on behalf of the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organisation (SEAMEO) Regional Language Centre (RELC), located in Singapore. RELC journal provides information and ideas on theories, research, methods, and materials about language education (both learning and teaching). It encourages submissions that bridge between theory and practice, allowing the practitioner and researcher to connect. Articles are in English.
• Report of the ... Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies The reports of the annual Round Table Meetings on Linguistics and Language studies is sponsored by Georgetown University, Institute of Languages and Linguistics. Conference proceedings appear to be in English.
• Research on Language and Social Interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction publishes empirical and theoretical research on language. Submissions from researchers in communication, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, linguistic anthropology and ethnography are the most active contributors, but the editors also encourage articles from a broad range of interaction researchers. Articles are in English.
• Revue de Linguistique Romane = Journal of Romance Linguistics Revue de Linguistique Romane, the Journal of Romance Linguistics, is published by the Society of Romance Linguistics. The journal focuses on the comparison of languages, diachrony, philology and variation, especially diatopic. It covers the whole field of Romance linguistics (individual languages ​like French, Italian, Spanish), varieties of these languages, and comparative studies. The journal accepts submissions in all Romance languages.
• SAMLA News SAMLA News is the publication of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, an organization of teachers, scholars, and graduate students dedicated to the advancement of literary and linguistic scholarship and teaching in the modern languages. Articles are in English.
• Semiotica Semiotica publishes articles related to all branches of semiotics. Articles are in English and French, and occasionally German.
• South African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies South African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies publishes articles from a wide range of linguistic topics and acts as a forum for research into all of the languages of southern Africa, including English and Afrikaans. The journal encourages contributions on theoretical (syntax, phonology, semantics) and applied (sociolinguistic topics, language teaching, language policy) linguistics. Review articles, short research reports and book reviews are also welcomed. Articles in languages other than English are accompanied by an extended English summary.
• South Atlantic Review South Atlantic Review, like SAMLA News, is a publication of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. SAR is concerned with language, literature, rhetoric, and composition, and other topics of scholarly interest in the humanities. Articles are in English.
• Sprache und Datenverarbeitung = Language and Data Processing Sprache und Datenverarbeitung, or SDV (International Journal of Language Data Processing) publishes research related to linguistic data processing and computational linguistics. Publication languages ​​are German and English.
• Studies in Language Studies in Language promotes the discussion of issues in contemporary linguistics, with a particular interest in empirical research in the functionalist tradition, which recognizes the diversity and variability of human languages and of communication patterns), the historical dynamics of languages, and the embedding of language in both social practices and cognition. Articles are in English.
• Studies in Philippine Linguistics Studies in Philippine Linguistics is a publication of the Linguistic Society of the Philippines. The journal focuses on descriptive, comparative, historical, and areal linguistics. Its primary interest is linguistic theory, but also publishes on the application of theory to language teaching, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and more. Articles are primarily published in English, with a minority in Filipino.
• Studies in Second Language Acquisition Studies in Second Language Acquisition is an international journal focused on the acquisition or use of non-native and heritage languages (and pedagogy related to language acquisition). Articles include qualitative and quantitative analyses as well as essays on current theoretical issues. Articles are in English.
• Syntax and Semantics Syntax and Semantics focuses on research involving the sub-systems of grammar that interface with syntax and semantics-- including the interface itself as well as the systematic interplay of syntax and semantics with pragmatics, information structure, and discourse. It encourages research that brings new forms of empirical evidence to bear on issues of theoretical syntax and semantics. Articles are in English.
• Syntaxe & Semantique Syntaxe et sémantique is focused on the structuring and interpretation of linguistic objects, in diachronic and synchronic terms, in French or in other languages. Articles are in French and English.
• System System is focused on the applications of educational technology and applied linguistics to problems of foreign language teaching and learning. System prefers articles that have a sound theoretical base with a visible practical application which can be generalized. Articles are in English.
• Text & Talk Text & Talk (originally TEXT in 1981) provides a forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies. It primarily focuses on the situational and historical nature of text or talk production, the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. It encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes. Articles are in English.
• Theoretical Linguistics Theoretical Linguistics is a review journal. Each issue has a long target article related to a topic of general linguistic interest, together with several shorter reactions, comments and reflections on it. With this format, the journal aims to stimulate discussion in linguistics and adjacent fields of study, in particular across schools of different theoretical orientations. Articles are in English.
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• Open access
• Published: 19 August 2024

Radiology education for medical students: a qualitative exploration of educational topics, teaching methods and future strategies

• Frederike S. Harthoorn 1 , 2 ,
• Sascha W. J. Scharenborg 1 , 2 ,
• Monique Brink 2 ,
• Liesbeth Peters-Bax 2 &
• Dylan Henssen 2  

BMC Medical Education volume  24 , Article number:  891 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

Imaging techniques play a central role in modern medicine and therefore it would be beneficial for all medical students to incorporate radiology education in medical school curricula. However, a formal undergraduate radiology curriculum with well-defined learning objectives remains lacking in The Netherlands. This study aims to qualitatively ascertain opinions from clinicians (radiologists and non-radiologists) with regard to radiology education in the medical school curricula, including topics, teaching methods and strategies.

A qualitative study with in-depth semi-structured interviews was conducted. Inclusion was carried out until saturation was achieved, after which 2 additional interviews were held. Interviews were conducted using open-ended questions, following a predefined topic list. The constant comparative method was applied in order to include new questions when unexpected topics arose during the interviews. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and coded using a thematic analysis approach. Codes were organized into categories and themes by discussion between the researchers.

Forty-four clinicians were interviewed (8 radiologists, 36 non-radiologists). The three main themes that were derived from the interviews were: (1) expectations of indispensable knowledge and skills on radiology, (2) organization of radiology education within the medical curriculum and (3) promising educational innovations for the radiology curriculum. The qualitative study design provides more in-depth knowledge on clinicians’ views on educational topics.

Conclusions

The themes and statements of this study provided new insights into educational methods, timing of radiology education and new topics to teach. More research is needed to gain consensus on these subjects and inclusion of the opinion of medical students with regard to radiology education is needed.

• Radiology education in medical curricula was considered important by all interviewees

• Integrating radiology and anatomy in Longitudinal learning communities (LLC’s) could be a promising educational strategy

• Integration of ultrasound education in medical curricula should be investigated further

Peer Review reports

Imaging technologies play a central role in the practice of modern medicine. Therefore, it is not surprising that previous studies suggest that all medical students would benefit from (basic) knowledge concerning medical imaging technologies and radiology [ 24 , 37 , 63 ]. However, radiology education is not well integrated in the medical curricula [ 21 , 25 , 29 , 37 ] and students’ lacking knowledge can be potentially dangerous [ 19 , 63 ]. In turn, medical students (including interns) and residents reported a lack of confidence when interpreting radiology examinations, including (chest) radiographs [ 19 , 48 ]. Moreover, lacking radiological knowledge was found to be correlated with an overutilization of medical imaging services [ 27 ], leading to increased societal healthcare-related expenses. Consequently, a need for radiology education in medical schools is recognized among teachers, medical students and curriculum designers [ 1 , 29 , 37 , 42 , 44 , 47 , 48 , 52 , 61 ]. Albeit, the learning objectives of such a radiology curriculum remains a topic of debate [ 61 ]. Therefore, proper identification of useful learning objectives for radiology education in medical curricula should be carried out [ 23 , 54 , 60 , 61 ]. The first step of defining learning objectives is to determine which educational topics are important to teach [ 26 , 34 , 60 , 5 ].

When defining these, it is important to identify the opinions of both clinicians (radiologists and non-radiologists) and medical students since both groups influence which topics are considered important to teach during medical school [ 39 ]. Opinions on this topic diverse, due to the fast technological developments in this broad field, which covers nearly every medical discipline for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes [ 23 , 34 , 63 ]. Several studies have previously aimed to determine radiology curriculum topics by questioning different groups of physicians (both radiologists and non-radiologists) and educational experts using questionnaires [ 32 , 36 , 48 , 53 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 55 , 61 ]. Overall, these studies provided lists of interpretative and non-interpretative skills that respondents agreed on what should be taught in medical school regarding radiology. The most commonly mentioned interpretative skill concerned the systematic approach of reading chest radiographs [ 32 , 36 , 48 , 53 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 55 ]. Suggested non-interpretative skills were more diverse and included (a) the basic physical mechanisms of ionizing radiation, including knowledge on radiation risks [ 32 , 36 , 53 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 55 , 61 ], (b) the principles of justification of procedures (e.g., knowing when to use intravenous contrast agents) [ 32 , 36 , 48 , 53 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 55 , 61 ], and comprehension of the role, indications and limitations of diagnostic imaging (and interventional) techniques [ 32 , 36 , 48 , 53 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 55 , 61 ].

Nevertheless, the aforementioned studies used a survey-based approach in which rather pre-determined information is collected from a large group of participants [ 32 , 36 , 48 , 53 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 55 ]. This study aimed to build on this work by employing an inductive, qualitative approach, allowing for the opportunity to acquire participants’ opinions without any influence of preset questions and to explore these answers to gain more detailed information on a broad range of topics [ 22 , 58 ]. Therefore, it is possible to gain a more accurate insight into the wide diversity of current ideas on education on imaging technology that are continuously changing. Limitations of qualitative research, on the other hand, concern the labor-intensive nature of such studies, which explains why in most fields, qualitative data are lacking. Also, qualitative data are more subjective than quantitative data as the interviewee has more control over the content of the data. Therefore, unnecessary quantification of qualitative data should be avoided as it falsely suggests objective, statistically proven results [ 10 , 38 ].

Consequently, there is a recognized need for enhanced radiology education in medical schools among teachers, students, and curriculum designers. This study aimed to 1) Identify key topics that should be included in a radiology curriculum, 2) Determine effective teaching methods for radiology education and 3) Propose strategies for integrating radiology education into existing medical school curricula. Therefore, we qualitatively investigated the perspectives of clinicians (both radiologists and non-radiologists) on radiology education in medical curricula.

An exploratory inductive qualitative study focusing on the role of radiology education in medical curricula was performed. A pragmatic qualitative approach was used with the aim to identify topics in radiology education that clinicians considered important to embed in the medical curriculum. A sample of clinicians involved in medical education in the Netherlands was asked to provide their insights using in-depth semi-structured interviews. Interviews were performed following an inductive iterative process using the constant comparative method [ 31 ]. This implies that if new topics arose during interviews, it was possible to explore these topics and thereby allowing new topics to be added to the interview guide during the experiment. The interview guide is provided in Table  1 . After interviewing, a thematic approach was used to analyze the data.

Relevant scientific literature was reviewed on learning objectives and teaching methods in radiology education in medical school. After reviewing the available literature, two researchers (F.H. en D.H.) constructed a topic list. An inductive iterative interviewing process was carried out using the constant comparative method [ 51 ]. Therefore, new topics could be added to the topic list during the interviews.

Participants

A list of eligible clinicians was constructed by reviewing hospitals and general practitioners within the training region of the university medical center in the east of The Netherlands (OpleidingsRegio Oost-Nederland). The contact person of each practice or department that provided a mandatory internship within the medical curriculum or an elective internship in radiology was contacted by e-mail in order to recruit eligible clinicians. Only clinical specialties embedding radiological imaging in their daily clinical practice were deemed eligible. Therefore, clinicians of the department of psychiatry, dermatology and ophthalmology were excluded from this study. The remaining clinicians were eligible if they participated in any medical curriculum in the Netherlands, regardless of being involved in the Bachelor’s or Master’s phase. Additionally, clinicians needed to be board-certified and actively working medical specialists, general practitioners or residents in radiology. Moreover, board-certified radiologists of the same training region who were involved in (any) medical curriculum in the Netherlands were included to provide more insight into what these “imaging experts” considered important to teach. Eligible clinicians were contacted by use of e-mail. After no initial response, the eligible clinicians were contacted again two weeks later. A third reminder was sent after a longer period of time, which varied from two weeks to three months. If no response was received, the participant was excluded from further inclusion.

Ethical statement

This study was approved by the ethics committee of the Netherlands Association of Medical Education (NVMO, case number 2023.2.9). Before being interviewed, clinicians confirmed to participate in the study. Informed consent was obtained from all clinicians prior to the interview in which the clinicians consented to have the interview audio-recorded for further analyses. Moreover, all methods were carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. All recorded data was stored on a secured disc, to which only one researcher (F.H.) had access. Transcribed data was stored and analyzed anonymously.

Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted by one of the researchers (F.H.). Clinicians decided in which way the interviews were held: in person, via electronic telecommunication software (i.e. Skype version 8.65.0.78; Skype Technologies, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg Palo Alto, CA, United States) or by telephone. In addition, four clinicians provided extensive answers to interview questions via e-mail. These data were also used in the data analysis. The interviews started with a short introduction of the research content followed by an open question on the participant’s thoughts on this matter. During the interviews, the interviewer used open-ended questions and encouraged the clinicians to speak openly and express their opinions, thoughts and considerations. The interviewer explained that there were no relations with the board of examiners, the university medical center educational board or the educational management team. In order to ensure reliable data, all interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim afterwards. Each transcript was thereafter analyzed using direct content analysis [ 30 ]. Starting after the first interview had taken place; transcriptions were coded line-by-line, through which a code list was created. Coding was continued after each interview. Inclusion of new participants was halted when no new topics and codes arose from this process, indicating that data saturation occurred. To confirm data saturation, two additional interviews were held. When confirmed, inclusion of new participants was stopped.

Data analysis

The interview transcripts were analyzed qualitatively. The first four transcripts were independently analyzed by two researchers (F.H. and B.v.W.). Coding results were compared and discrepancies were resolved by discussion. If necessary, a third more experienced investigator (D.H.) could be asked to help resolve issues. Since there were no major discrepancies, further coding and analysis were carried out independently by one of the researchers (F.H.), who met periodically with one of the other researchers (D.H.) to discuss codes and themes until consensus was reached. The coding process was performed using Atlas.ti software, version 8.2.29.0 (ATLAS.ti Scientific Software Development GmbH, Berlin, Germany). The constructed codebook was organized into categories and themes which arose after discussion of all the different codes between two of the researchers (F.H. and D.H.). Categories were used to group codes, which were then grouped into several themes. The categories and themes were shared with the other researchers in order to assess their validity.

A total of 97 eligible clinicians (radiologists; 10.3% and non-radiologists; 89.7%) were contacted by one of the researchers (F.H.) via e-mail between July and October 2020 (Table  2 ). Non-responders were excluded after a period of six months after the first e-mail was sent ( n  = 44). Clinicians were also excluded if they expressed to have no active involvement in medical curricula ( n  = 3) (Fig.  1 ). Of the included clinicians, four reactions were received via e-mail, while the other forty respondents provided their input by participating in an interview. The interviews lasted between 17 and 59 min. Participant characteristics are displayed in Table  2 .

Selection of the clinicians. 1 Six clinicians were not available due to lack of time . 2 Three contacted clinicians were excluded since they no longer worked for the specific training region

Ten categories of items were distilled from the transcribed codes, which were arranged in the following three themes (Fig.  2 ).

An overview of the subcategorized themes. Three themes accompanied by ten categories were derived from the interviews during the analysis after qualitative exploration of the opinions of clinicians and general practicioners on imaging technologies in medical school curricula

Theme 1: Expectations with regard to educational topics in radiology education

Anatomical knowledge.

Interviewees advocated that students need to be able to identify important anatomical landmarks and gross anatomical structures on the different radiologic imaging techniques. Knowledge of anatomy was believed to be the foundation of understanding a radiologic image by both radiologists and non-radiologists.

“It starts with that [knowledge of the human anatomy], as this forms the foundation of radiology. Then, you can also start interpreting medical images” – General Practitioner

“… but I sense that there is little attention for forming an idea on the anatomical relations. And in the end, that is the essence…” – Surgeon

Conversely, Computed Tomography scans (CT-scans) and Ultrasound (US) were suggested as ideal tools to teach anatomy in medical school. This was believed to benefit both anatomy education and radiology education. This combination provides clinical significance to anatomical structures as well as a three-dimensional insight into the anatomy. Furthermore, it would lead to early exposure to medical imaging in the curriculum. Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans (MRI-scans) were both suggested and dissuaded as a teaching tool because of their complexity.

Skills in interpretation

Interviews with both radiologists and non-radiologists revealed that the ability to interpret a wide range of radiological studies should not be included as a learning objective in medical school. Learning to interpret specific radiological studies (e.g., CT study of the thorax, brain MRI) should be incorporated in post-academic education for residents in training, as there is a greater exposure to these specific radiological studies during this period. Nevertheless, interviewees stated four things a medical student should be able to do concerning radiographs: (1) distinguish abnormal from normal (recognizing gross abnormalities), (2) identify some very common pathologies (e.g., pulmonary infiltrates, common bone fractures, joint luxation, pulmonary edema, hemorrhage, ischemia and malignancies), (3) identify acute diagnoses (e.g., vertebral fractures and pneumothorax on radiographs) and (4) acquire a systematic approach when reading radiographs (both chest radiographies and musculoskeletal radiographies). The extent to which these skills should be mastered under supervision was scarcely discussed and varied greatly.

Basic technological knowledge

Knowledge on the techniques of the four major different imaging modalities (radiography, CT, MRI and ultrasound) was regarded important as this provides knowledge on (contra-)indications and strengths and weaknesses of each imaging modality. It can also help a student interpret medical images as it helps to understand which structures are visible and why they are displayed in the way they are (e.g., the differences in size while comparing an AP- and PA-radiograph). It could also help students to understand the content of a radiological report (e.g., helping to understand why radiologists discuss patient positioning in their reports).

“You have to know the basics. You can order radiographs, a CT-scan, or an ultrasound or an MRI-scan. And the reason why you would choose one option or another is always different, but you always visualize something with it. I consider it important to know what a specific imaging technique shows you.” – Emergency doctor.

More specifically, it was considered important to have knowledge on the basics of ionization radiation, including its hazardous effects. For MR imaging, knowledge of the basic differences between T1-weighted-, T2-weighted-, and fluid-attenuation inversion recovery (FLAIR) sequences were disclosed as important subjects to master for medical students.

In addition, the impact that a radiological examination has on a patient (both mentally as well as physically) should also be embedded in the medical curriculum. This would also help future healthcare professionals to inform their patients properly in order to achieve well-informed consent.

“...I think that it is good to know because we receive a lot of questions from patients about radiologic studies” – General Practitioner

Comprehension of the role, indications and limitations of diagnostic imaging techniques

The most common (contra-)indications and limitations of the most frequently used modalities are seen as imperative knowledge which a student should acquire in medical school. This includes insights in accuracy rates of different radiological imaging methods and how these rates are influenced by other factors, as well as the costs of the different modalities. It should be noted that some clinicians mentioned that keeping up with the quickly changing indications could be a challenge and another participant did not find knowledge in indication important. All believed that you should always consult a radiologist when in doubt.

The benefits and drawbacks of the use of contrast agents, especially in CT imaging, and its (contra-)indications are worth emphasizing, for it has been mentioned multiple times in the interviews and is apart from one explicit modality.

“I believe that it is very important that you know which radiological examinations are available and what you can use each one of them for. I also believe that it is very important that students are aware of the costs of the different imaging modalities and that they also take this into account when making a decision. And that they realize which study is useful for a specific question” – General Practitioner.

Implications of radiology use in clinical practice

As each medical specialty has some level of experience with certain radiological imaging methods, it is important that students learn which techniques are used in various settings.. This was reported as a learning goal which should be achieved through experience-based learning (i.e., during internships). Also, clinicians expressed that it was paramount that students learn to write a concise though complete request for radiological imaging. In addition, students need to learn to look critically and should learn how to implement the radiologist's conclusion in the clinical setting for further medical management and/or follow-up.

Finally, students should also learn to consult the radiologist when questions arise regarding the most optimal imaging method or the radiological conclusion and how to interpret it.

“Radiological findings are subjected to interpretation: someone sees an abnormality and expects it to be something. And those expectations are supported or undermined by the clinical presentation and you have to either provide this knowledge to the radiologist or have to take this into account yourself”—ENT-specialist.

“I noticed that they [students and junior doctors] have no comprehension of contrast agents and therefore just follow guidelines which state to ‘Check renal function’. They have no idea why and whether they have to order for contrast agents” – Radiologist.

Theme 2: Teaching strategies with regard to radiology education

Timing and emphasizing responsibilities.

Most interviewees were convinced that during the Bachelor’s phase (i.e., the first three years of the university curriculum), imaging technology education needs to focus on the differences between modalities from a technical point of view. During those three years, radiological images should be used to help students understand the technical basis of imaging and recognize anatomical structures. This should gradually evolve into using radiological images to recognize simple pathology at the end of the Bachelor’s phase (e.g., bone fractures, pneumonia, pneumothorax). During the Master’s phase (last three years of university curriculum), the interviewees considered applied radiology as an important learning goal. This education could then be combined with recapitulating the anatomy.

“I think that it should definitely be addressed in the Bachelor’s phase, but that the subjects in radiology that are embedded in an internship should be addressed in more detailed and specific way before that internship. I am actually getting thrilled by that idea”—General practitioner.

It was believed that students will get more familiar with radiology when learning about imaging technologies is combined with anatomy and repeated over the years. Doing this while emphasizing different aspects of radiology during different learning phases of students, was also believed to result in a greater feeling of competence for medical students, especially with regard to chest radiographs and musculoskeletal radiographs. Therefore, radiology education during the Master’s phase of medicine should also focus on basic, structured interpretation of chest radiographs.

Assessment during internships of other disciplines

Interviewees suggested incorporating Entrusted Professional Abilities (EPAs) for radiology in the internships, so that radiology knowledge can be reviewed and improved continuously. Therefore, the knowledge of radiology can be monitored during the internships in the same way the discipline of radiology is integrated through all the different specialisms in medicine.

Theme 3: Promising educational strategies in radiology education

Longitudinal subject planning.

The idea of Longitudinal Learning Communities (LLCs) in radiology was discussed during all interviews. LLCs were defined as a community-based approach to learning during a time period of more than 1 year, encouraging meaningful student interaction and small-group learning as well as peer-group evaluation. LLCs were believed to help students to develop a collaborative approach to clinical practice, particularly in radiology. Clinicians believed that a timely repetition of anatomical and radiological knowledge before an internship would result in an improved learning experience.

Three clinicians, all non-radiologists, did not support more radiology education in already overcrowded medical curricula. One participant explicitly expressed that an LLC in radiology would take up too much time. Other interviewees (both radiologists and non-radiologists), however, considered radiology to be important enough to devote attention to, for example by use of LLCs. One participant also suggested saving time by combining the LLC with anatomy and physiology education throughout the medical curriculum. The learning materials used in such LLCs on radiology education were discussed as well. Suggested teaching methods included e-learnings and interactive workgroups. Additionally, the use of clinical cases during education as a form of applied radiology was expressed by many. Nevertheless, discrepancies remained with regard to the different teaching forms. Proposed forms were interactive teaching forms, clinical cases, lectures, computer orientated education, e-learnings, workshops, self-study, seminars, learning during the internships themselves (via specific educational moments, multidisciplinary meetings, during consulting hours at the outpatient department, radiology meetings, before surgery or via assignments). Clinicians expressed that they found it difficult to decide which educational methods would create the best learning environment for students.

Some additions to the described LLC were mentioned during the interviews. Several clinicians, both radiologists and non-radiologists, suggested adding practical ultrasound education to the LLC’s. One participant highlighted the importance of recapitulation shortly before practical education, also called in-time learning. This person believed that students would benefit more from good references, so they would know where to look when they need it and have clear learning objectives for radiology during their internships.

‘…I strongly believe that just in time learning would be a valuable option. If you simply teach students in-time where to find specific knowledge on radiology, they will use it when they need it the most. Then, all they need to do is practice their knowledge” – Geriatrician.

‘If you learn about radiological examinations relevant in the clinical practice that you are about to embark in, you will learn the basics just prior to your internship and the clinical context will help you to complete the picture. Together, I would consider this a rich learning experience for students” – Radiologist.

Internship in radiology

Due to a lack of time in the medical curriculum, most of the interviewees would not opt for the incorporation of a mandatory internship in radiology. Nevertheless, it was considered an important elective internship. Only one participant believed it was important to create time for a mandatory internship.

On the other hand, interviewees expressed that some practical experience in radiology for all medical students would be beneficial to: (1) gain insight into the tasks of a radiologist, (2) become aware of one’s own strengths and limitations regarding reading radiological examinations and (3) learn how to establish an optimal collaboration between radiologist and clinician. It was mentioned that such “intern days” could be integrated into the proposed LLCs in radiology or in various internships such as emergency and internal medicine or surgery.

“I consider it a good idea to offer it as an internship for choice, apart from the LLC”- Internal medicine doctor

Intracurricular primary radiologic skills

There was some discussion with regard to learning the skill of interpretation of a chest radiograph and the skill to perform a point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS). Chest radiography in itself takes a prominent place in radiology education and was believed to deserve a specific view on learning goals. There is an emerging use of POCUS in health care and the opinions on what should be taught on this subject diverse widely. Some interviewees thought that integrating POCUS as an intra-curricular learning goal would take up too much time to really let students master this skill. On the other hand, others were eager to implement teaching POCUS in the medical curriculum as it could serve as an extension on the physical examination with immediate results, low costs and high mobility with hand-held devices. It was mentioned that since so little is taught on ultrasound, there is so much to gain out of a bit more education.

“If you ask me, we will all throw out our stethoscope and let everyone have an ultrasound machine and I do believe that time will come. I just do not know how soon” – Emergency doctor

This study elucidated the views of both radiologists and non-radiologists and grouped these views in three themes: 1) Expectations with regard to educational topics in radiology education; 2) Teaching strategies with regard to radiology education; and 3) Promising educational strategies in radiology education.

These findings are largely corroborated by others. For example, Subramaniam et al. [ 53 , 55 , 55 ] also showed that radiology education should include the teaching of (contra-)indications for different imaging techniques, skills to systematically review chest and musculoskeletal radiographs, skills to identify gross abnormalities on radiographs and teaching students how to fit important findings in the clinical setting. However, contradictory to the studies of Subramaniam et al., interviewees did not express the reading of abdominal radiographs as an educational topic, which can be explained by the ongoing development of radiology in the clinical setting [ 2 , 57 ]. At the time of the publication of the papers of Subramaniam et al., abdominal radiographs had a more prominent clinical role than today.

Integration of radiology and anatomy education

Interviewees in this study stated that basic anatomical knowledge is needed to fully comprehend imaging studies. However, as less time is being assigned to anatomy education in medical curricula [ 18 , 35 , 4 ], learning about radiological examinations could become more complicated for students. Also, as Kourdioukova et al. [ 33 ] mention in their paper, Problem Based Curricula create a building block approach in which radiology and radiologic anatomy is relatively underrepresented in examinations. Integration of applied anatomy and applied radiology has been commonly suggested to optimize quality of anatomy and radiology education in modern medical curricula, [ 4 ,  14 , 28 , 36 ]. This was also objectified as radiology small group teaching significantly improved anatomy scores [ 8 , 9 ] and radiology skills [ 40 ]. Additionally, combining radiology and anatomy education has been described to be easily implementable in existing preclinical curricula, because it requires few additional resources [ 62 ]. Integration of radiology education with other disciplines has also been suggested [ 42 ]. Interestingly, in the current study, MRI sequence which were considered basic knowledge comprised T1-weighted images, T2-weighted images and FLAIR images, whereas other sequences were not mentioned. Fat suppression techniques were not discussed, although several advantages are well-known in for example neuroradiology [ 56 ] and imaging of the musculoskeletal system [ 16 ]. Also, the use of diffusion-weighted imaging was not mentioned as part of the basic knowledge that a medical student must obtain. Possibly, clinicians omitted these sequence as the physical concepts are somewhat more complex to explain to students during rotations. However, the exact motives remain elusive. Together with the positive feedback to the LLC in the interviews of this study, a balanced integration of radiology education in various subjects of teaching could be a promising next step for radiology educators.

Other innovative teaching methods which might play a role in the future of anatomy and radiology education, such as augmented reality, virtual reality and combined use of these techniques with radiological data were not mentioned during the interviews. Nevertheless, several publications point out the possible advantages of each individual technique [ 6 ,  3 , 12 , 13 , 41 ].

Radiology education topics: reading chest radiographs and practical teaching of ultrasound skills

Although in this study chest radiographs were considered an important educational topic in medical school, there was a wide diversity in opinion to what extent a student should master this subcategory of imaging technologies. Even though this study was not able to provide results to what extent of supervision level or entrusted professional activity a medical student should master this skill, this study was the first that objectified this wide diversity in opinions. We believe this should be investigated more profoundly to be able to create a properly adjusted learning objective on this topic. Especially since Eisen and colleagues found that only 15% of their study population, consisting of medical students, interns, residents and fellows, felt capable to interpret chest radiographs independently in an academic medical center setting [ 19 ]. This lack of confidence has been found by others as well [ 7 , 11 ].

Lastly, teaching ultrasound was a topic of debate in our study, which was widely discussed among the interviewees. This observed discrepancy is in line with literature on this topic [ 36 , 50 ]. Although ultrasound has been described as an educational tool to improve anatomy knowledge, physical examination skills, increase diagnostic accuracy and advance patient safety, the evidence regarding the effects of ultrasound education on these outcomes is very limited [ 20 ]. Nevertheless, various studies reported that medical students consider ultrasound education as valuable [ 15 , 17 , 46 , 49 , 59 ]. Despite this increased demand of ultrasound education in medical school, studies showed that hands-on education of ultrasound is taught at a minority of universities in Europe and the United States [ 43 , 45 ]. More research is needed to either create insight into the learning objectives of ultrasound in medical curricula or to chart the potential benefits of teaching ultrasound in medical school. Additionally, the effects of using ultrasound for educational goals on learning outcomes should be studied as well.

Strengths and limitations

The major strength of this study was the qualitative study design as a recent review highlighted that quality research is needed to investigate when and how radiology should be included in medical education [ 8 , 9 ]. A second strength concerns the exploration of the thoughts and opinions of a wide variety of clinicians included in this study. The sparse availability of recent scientific literature on the teaching of a dynamic subject like medical imaging illustrates that this is a relatively understudied domain and, simultaneously, shows the importance of the present work. This work, however, is not without its limitations. One limitation of this study was formed by the strictly defined inclusion criteria which only allowed clinicians from one region within The Netherlands to participate. The ideas on this topic within this region can differ from others since every training region has its own personal and cultural view on certain subjects and specific spearheads. This limitation regarding generalizability of the reported themes might also exist for the clinicians’ views on radiology education in countries other than The Netherlands. Secondly, this study population cannot be considered as a generalizable population of clinicians which are involved in medical education. For example, the number of radiologists participating in this study was larger as compared to the number of general practitioners (Table  2 ). Therefore, radiologists were overrepresented in the study population. In addition, some medical disciplines, such as psychiatry, ophthalmology and dermatology were excluded from this interview study due to the fact that these clinicians do not frequently encounter radiology. However, the risk of potential bias is limited as the nature of this study and research question did not warrant the inclusion of these clinicians. Furthermore, a limitation of the qualitative study design concerns the relative subjectivity of the results as participants hold control over the content of the data. This prevents quantification of the results and warrants future studies to investigate the statistical significance of the here described findings [ 10 , 38 ]. Additionally, it must be noted that clinicians are no education experts. Future implementation of these results should be carried out in close collaboration with education experts.

This qualitative study provided more in-depth knowledge on well-known topics with regard to radiology education in medical curricula. More knowledge with regard to educational methods, timing of radiology education was distilled and several new topics arose. This includes thoughts on educating ultrasound skills to undergraduates and the views on a longitudinal learning community in radiology in order to integrate imaging technologies in a problem based medical curriculum. It was recommended that radiology education should be more embedded in the medical curriculum and various educational strategies and topics to achieve this were suggested. Nevertheless, to which extent these educational topics should be mastered, what resulting learning objectives will need to entail and how to evaluate them need further research.

Availability of data and materials

The dataset generated from the interviews and analyzed during the current study are not publicly available since individual privacy could potentially be compromised but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Abbreviations

Longitudinal learning community/curriculum

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Beau van Woudenberg, MSc, for his help with coding the interviews and with his valuable insights into qualitative research methods. No potential conflict of interest was reported.

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FH contributed to the design of the study, the acquisition, analysis and interpretation of data and drafted the work. SS and MB have substantively revised the work. LPB designed the study and substantively revised the work. DH supervised the whole project and consequently contributed to the design of the study and to revisions of the work. All authors approve the submitted version of this article and have agreed to both to be personally accountable for the author’s own contributions and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated, resolved and the resolution is documented in the literature.

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Harthoorn, F.S., Scharenborg, S.W.J., Brink, M. et al. Radiology education for medical students: a qualitative exploration of educational topics, teaching methods and future strategies. BMC Med Educ 24 , 891 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05879-0

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Topical Trends and Research Frontiers of Applied Linguistics Research Articles with Different Methodological Orientations: A Bibliometric-Synthetic Review

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The expanding scope of research trends and methodological advancements, along with the dissemination of voluminous publications in different domains and sub-domains of applied linguistics, has necessitated a call for a scientometrics movement in applied linguistics. This review examined research trends in applied linguistics articles as reflected in topical issues (i.e., keyword co-occurrence analysis). We utilized keyword analysis to depict research trends and frontiers in light of methodological orientations (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods research, and secondary studies). The dataset includes 3824 applied linguistics articles published in 18 top-tier journals from 2009 to 2018 that were manually identified and selected based on synthetic techniques. We used keyword analysis (co-word analysis) using VOSviewer software to analyze and visualize the various topics covered by articles in each methodological orientation (qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods, review, non-empirical). We identified the most represented research topics and frontiers in quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, and secondary studies. Concerning the research frontiers, the results revealed that quantitative researchers targeted language testing and assessment, qualitative researchers addressed discourse and interaction analysis, MMR researchers concentrated on SLA, and secondary studies focused on SLA-related issues such as L2 feedback. As for topics, both quantitative and secondary studies targeted SLA-related issues and qualitative and mixed-methods research mainly addressed academic writing. Implications for employing scientometrics techniques in different research paradigms are discussed.

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Department of Foreign Languages, Iran University of Science & Technology, Tehran, Iran

Mohammad Amini Farsani

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Hamid R. Jamali

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Farsani, M.A., Jamali, H.R. (2024). Topical Trends and Research Frontiers of Applied Linguistics Research Articles with Different Methodological Orientations: A Bibliometric-Synthetic Review. In: Meihami, H., Esfandiari, R. (eds) A Scientometrics Research Perspective in Applied Linguistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51726-6_4

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