An Empirical Reflection on Educational Administration Quarterly's Distinctive Contributions to the Field, 1965–2020

Abstract

Despite its historical status as the world's leading research journal in the field of educational leadership and management, Educational Administration Quarterly faces the challenge of adapting to a rapidly changing publication environment. This bibliometric review sought to highlight the journal's distinctive contributions and identify future challenges. The review applied bibliometric analyses to 1,357 articles published in the journal from 1965 through 2020. Geographic authorship patterns have remained quite stable across the past six decades, with the national origin of authors highly skewed toward the USA, and to a far greater extent than other leading journals in the field. Document citation analysis supported the conclusion that the journal has been a key channel for the dissemination of programmatic research spanning multiple decades with an emphases on leadership, leadership effects, and social justice. Analysis of the intellectual structure of the journal's corpus identified four schools of thought associated with Leadership for Learning, Teacher Development and School Change, School Culture and Organization, and Social Justice. Journal co-citation analysis found that the content published in Educational Administration Quarterly has been increasingly influenced by research published in the fields of management science, applied psychology, and general education, in addition to educational leadership and management. Based on this review, the author concludes that the journal's caretakers face an urgent and important decision concerning their vision of the journal's future. Do they wish for the journal to remain a prestigious “national” journal, or become an international journal that engages meaningfully with the global community of scholars?