It could be argued that by setting up new book series and journals publishers
define thefield to a considerable extent. In this way, they also create a community
of authors, editors and reviewers that more or less constitute thefield.
5.4 Conclusion
This chapter presents the most important books and journals as listed by
the informants. There is agreement on what the most important journals in the
field are and these are mentioned more often than other journals that are
either more peripheral or too recent to have had an impact.
For both journal articles and books a very large number of publications
was mentioned with only a few of these being mentioned by a substantial
number of informants. This suggests that even for the biased population in
my study, which are basically the researchers working in the area of SLA,
there is not really a common core of publications that defines thefield and
that every student of AL should read. The wide range of journals and books
on the one hand reflects the interdisciplinarity of thefield. On the other
hand, it suggests that the cohesion of thefield is fairly limited. In addition to
the wide range of interpretations of what AL is, as discussed in Chapter 3,
the data on the most important journal articles and books suggest that AL as
afield is at best loosely structured. It would be useful to have similar data
from otherfields that are more tightly structured based on other criteria
than the range of publications. Only then, conclusions can be drawn on the
comparative looseness or tightness of AL as afield. In a way, the publishers
may have been more influential in defining thefield than the researchers and
the literature they cite.
Figure 5.1Number of books published by John Benjamins and Multilingual Matters
between 1980 and 2015
56 Most important articles and books in AL
90
80
70
60
SO
40
30
20
10
0
1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
till till till till till till till
1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015Multilingual Matters
Benjamins