Exploring the themes of the territory: a topic modelling approach to 40 years of publications in International Journal of Lifelong Education (1982–2021)

ABSTRACT

The question of what the research of lifelong education is all about needs to be revisited from time to time. Not only is this line of research approached from a multitude of academic disciplines – such as sociology, psychology or philosophy – the very concepts that are used to denote the field also undergo important changes over time, e.g. from lifelong education to lifelong learning. In this contribution, we will explore this rather elusive research territory using a large-scale text analysis of a specific scientific journal, International Journal of Lifelong Education, based on metadata (abstracts, keywords and titles) from 1,185 articles published between 1982 to 2021. Based on topic modelling techniques, we identify the main themes that have been prevalent within the journal, and how the journal’s content has changed character over time. We end the paper with a more critical examination of what kind of political and scientific currents might help explain what has led research practices to be more descriptive, micro-oriented and work-related over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociology of science
• lifelong education
• bibliometrics
• research

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the research assistant Erik Anders at the Department of Computer and Information Science at Linköping University who, in collaboration with Erik Nylander, helped integrate and analyse the bibliometric data in Python. Preliminary findings from this research were presented to a meeting of editors and editorial advisory board members of IJLE in June 2021; the authors wish to thank those who contributed to that discussion. We also received useful comments on early drafts of this article from the research seminar at the Division of Education and Adult Learning (Linköping University), and the two anonymous reviewers of IJLE.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. More on the mathematical basis of the model can be found in Blei et al. (2003).

2. In fact, based on these iterative processes between modelling and interpretation, topic modelling construction has been compared to ‘grounded theory’ (Baumer et al., 2017).

3. Hypothetically, the decline of this workplace learning topic in the journal after 2010 might be connected to the introduction of Vocations and Learning (2008–), which is a specific journal oriented to issues of workplace learning.

4. This scepticism towards sanctioned instruments and tools of governmentality should, of course, extend to the use and misuse of bibliometrics itself (cf. Gingras, 2014; Nylander et al., 2013).