ADULT EDUCATION QUARTERLY / August 2001Taylor / A CONTENT ANALYSIS ADULT EDUCATION QUARTERLY FROM 1989 TO 1999: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF ALL SUBMISSIONS

The intent of this study was to conduct an analysis of all submissions (accepted and rejected) to Adult Education Quarterly from 1989 to 1999. Previous reviews of the journal had only analyzed published articles. Including all submissions revealed a more complete analysis of trends, and patterns of acceptances were revealed. Trends for the previous decade included continued domi-nance of academic, male, single-author submissions from North America. However, there have been increasing numbers of submissions by women, of a qualitative research design, and on top-ics about gender/diversity and training/continuing professional education. Also, acceptance rates were higher than average for men; academics; submissions from Australia/New Zealand, and Europe; qualitative research; and the subjects of adult development, gender/diversity, eval-uation/testing, philosophy, and research methods. As a result, a more complete picture of the publication activity of the journal is possible when all the submissions, not just acceptances, are included in a content analysis. Academic publications represent the knowledge base of a given discipline and reflect the discipline’s history, trends, research norms, and social structures of com-munication among scholars. By analyzing the publication activity of a given jour-nal, much can be learned about a field of study (see Foley, Keener, & Branch, 1994; Nietupski, Hamre-Nietupski, Curtin, & Shrikanth, 1997; Ongel & Smith, 1994). This practice of analyzing journals has also been a custom of scholarly publica-tions in the field of adult education, particularly with Adult Education Quarterly (AEQ), the preeminent journal in the field as judged by the professorate (Rachal & Sargent, 1995). During the past 30 years, there have been numerous analyses look-ing for publication patterns in length of articles, citations, subject and methodology, and the journal’s receptivity to feminist and international issues, to mention a fe