IntroductionMichael Crichton argued, "If you do not know history, then you do not know anything. You are a leaf that does not know it is part of a tree" (Crichton, 1999, p. 73). This is particularly true in the field of Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) because the field is broad (Wilson, 2012) and often described as a "meta" field (Hill et al., 2004) embedded in many other disciplines. Because the field is broad and meta, IDT scholars are dispersed among many other disciplines and departments as broad as psychology, learning sciences, instructional systems, curriculum development and educational technology (ibid.). Because IDT scholars are dispersed, so is our scholarship, making it difficult to understand and fully grasp the entirety of the field, and who the key scholars, ideas, questions and methods are that lead this discipline.In this paper, we build upon previous efforts to define the field by its scholarship through a summary of the key authors, papers, and topics garnered from a broader and more inclusive scholarship pool than ever used previously. Using an automated script, we report aggregated findings from 65 of the top IDT journals available in the Scopus database. This data, freely available to subscribing institutions, is a rich pool of data from which to better understand, in the words of Crichton, what our recent history is as a field and how we all, as leaves, contribute to the tree of IDT scholarship.
AbstractUsing the online Scopus database, we retrieved all instructional design and technology (IDT) scholarship between 2007 and 2017 across 65 journals. In this paper, we analyzed the research and trends in this corpus of IDT scholarship and investigated the top cited papers, keywords, authors, publishing countries and publishing universities. We also analyzed the effect of collaboration on citation numbers as well as how journal citation metrics differ across databases (eg, Scopus, Google Scholar). The field of IDT is broad and diverse, and this paper plays an important role in providing a glance into the past to understand scholarship trends. Knowing our history can help us reassess where we should go moving forward as the field continues to grow in the 21st century.Research trends in instructional design and technology journals 79 research database, approval was not needed from an institutional ethics committee. The authors declare they have no funding or conflict of interest in this work.