Mapping the intellectual lineage of educational management, administration and leadership, 1972–2020

Abstract

This review has two purposes. First, we document the body of knowledge that has accumulated in Educational Management, Administration & Leadership over its five decades of publication. Second, we seek to identify the distinctive contributions of Educational Management, Administration & Leadership as a research journal in educational leadership and management. The review employed the bibliometric method in order to analyze the forms of corpus of 1438 articles published in Educational Management, Administration & Leadership between 1972 and the end of 2020. Bibliometric analyses used to document and assess the Educational Management, Administration & Leadership corpus included descriptive statistics, document citation and co-citation analysis, author co-citation analysis and keyword analysis. The review found that articles authored outside the UK have continued to grow as a proportion of the journal’s annual volume, thereby strengthening Educational Management, Administration & Leadership’s status as an ‘international educational leadership journal’. Document and keyword analyses found that ‘leadership’ has supplanted ‘administration’ and ‘management’ as the dominant driver in Educational Management, Administration & Leadership content since 2012. These analyses further affirmed the continuing strength of the journal’s conceptual contributions to the literature as well as its publication of a significant set of papers on shared forms of leadership. The review highlighted two areas for Educational Management, Administration & Leadership’s future development: further enhancing its citation impact and managing the growth of its international contributions.