Research Trends in Applied Linguistics (2017–2021): A Scientometric Review of 42 Journals

Scientometric methods have increasingly been used to provide historical as well as state-of-the-art accounts of research in various disciplines, including applied linguistics. To provide an updated overview of the research trends in applied linguistics, we analyzed 7602 articles with over 198,000 unique references published between 2017 and 2021 in 42 SSCI-indexed applied linguistics journals. We aimed to track the (un)changing research foci and methodological orientations by examining the most frequently discussed topics, the most highly cited publications, and the most highly cited authors. The most popular research topics included multilingualism, translanguaging, psychological factors, vocabulary learning, teaching methods and teacher factors, linguistic complexity, bilingual advantage, and grammatical processing. New research tools (e.g., R statistics and eye-tracking), qualitative approaches, and research syntheses were on the rise. The heightened methodological awareness indexed applied linguistics’ greater effort to update and refine its toolkits as well as its emergence as a maturing discipline with greater diversity. Our analysis also identified newly emerged most cited publications (e.g., García, Ofelia, and Li Wei. Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and newly emerged most cited authors (e.g., Suresh Canagarajah, Paul Nation, R Core Team, Ofelia García, Douglas Bates, Luke Plonsky), pointing to new movers, shakers, and innovators in the discipline.