“…Studying this field by analysing its leading scientific journals has become a popular strategy in recent years (Hayes, 1992;Blunt & Lee, 1994;Rachal & Sargent, 1995;Taylor, 2001;Fejes, 2008;Harris & Morrison, 2011;St. Clair, 2011;Larsson, 2010;Fejes & Nylander, 2014), and the early examples of bibliometric studies and content analysis of adult education research date back to the 1970s (Dickinson & Rusnell, 1971;Long & Agyekum, 1974;Boshier & Pickard, 1979). In this article, we study the top-cited articles in three of the leading English-speaking adult education journals between the years 2005-2012 in order to examine if and in what aspects the field is shaped as heterogeneous and pluralistic.…”