Analyses of seven writing studies journals, 2000–2019, Part I: Statistical trends in references cited and lexical diversity

Writing studies has long been interested in histories of how the field writes. The recent turn to corpus-driven results about disciplinary trends opens opportunities to examine writing studies journals in the early twenty-first century longitudinally. This study presents an analysis of published articles (n = 2738) in seven major writing studies journals from 2000 to 2019. The analyzed journals are College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition, Research in the Teaching of English, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Written Communication. Findings include (1) the number of references per article increase over time, (2) references are getting slightly newer from 2000 to 2019, and (3) lexical diversity is decreasing over that same time period. The notable changes among these metrics occur between the first (2000s) and second (2010s) decades of the corpus’ time period. Finally, a broad literary review shows that these findings reflect trends in other disciplines.