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

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.