O n f e r e n c e

Cornelia Tschichold, Paul Meara 
Swansea University, Swansea, United Kingdom 
[e-mail] 
The Bibliometrics of Vocabulary CALL 
Bio data 
Cornelia Tschichold
is a senior lecturer at Swansea University. She has worked on 
grammar checking and on English multi-word units in computational lexicography. Her 
current research interests include the acquisition of vocabulary and phraseology and 
CALL. 
Paul Meara
founded the Vocabulary Acquisition Research Group, a significant inter-
national research team in 1990. He is now Honorary Professor at the Cardiff University 
and Swansea University. Paul's current research is mainly concerned with bibliometrics, 
and the way bibliographic tools can be used to make sense of messy research fields. He 
is also working on models of mental lexicons, with a view to simulating features of real 
lexicons such as vocabulary loss and attrition. 
Abstract 
A bibliometric analysis of a research field can reveal the lifecycle of papers, the 
productivity of authors, and shifts in focus (e.g. Jung (2005) for CALL) within an area of 
research over time. Looking more specifically at author co-citations can show the 
communities of researchers working on different subfields within such areas (e.g. Sim et 
al. (2012) for the area of computational linguistics, and Meara (2012) for second 
language vocabulary acquisition). In this presentation, we look at the bibliometrics of a 
narrower area, i.e. vocabulary in CALL, and examine the co-citations within this field as 
evidenced by relevant papers in several journals from the 1990s to 2012. We then 
compare the results to those from a similar analysis on vocabulary acquisition studies in 
the field of second language acquisition more generally. Such an analysis of who cites 
whom can be presented graphically to reveal clusters (or factions in Sim et al’s 
terminology) of varying density. The density itself can be seen as an indicator of 
collaboration or influence among the researchers inside a cluster and also between one 
cluster and another. Such an analysis will allow us to see whether CALL as a field has 
dense research links and whether the density is similar or not to the density of second 
language acquisition as a field of research.