O n f e r e n c e

Short paper 
This paper aims to analyze the field of vocabulary CALL in terms of the influences as they 
can be observed through a bibliometric approach, using a method called Inclusive Author 
Co-citation. This is based on the assumption that authors who are frequently cited 
together work in similar areas. The aim of this method is to make visible clusters of 
authors who work within the same subfield, presumably influencing each other’s work. 
The focus is thus more on communities of research than on individual papers and their 
citation numbers. 

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-340- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be 
The database that forms the source material for the bibliometric analysis consists of over 
100 papers that have appeared in the journals CALL, ReCALL, LT&T, and Calico and that 
fall into the area of vocabulary teaching and learning within CALL. This includes work that 
examines how glosses can improve learners’ vocabulary, whether electronic dictionaries 
improve learners’ results, as well as work on vocabulary trainers, and on collocation in 
the field of CALL. 
If we count the authors of all papers separately, i.e. disregarding the distinction between 
single-authored and co-authored papers, we arrive at over 160 names. Of these, the vast 
majority appear only once. Only about 20 authors have more than one paper in the 
corpus examined, and none has more than four. This pattern is quite similar to what 
Meara (2012) found for vocabulary acquisition studies in general. Considering citations 
next, the methodology employed for this analysis again focuses on authors rather than 
individual publications. So if a paper cites several works by one author, this still only 
counts as one citation. This principle is meant to give relatively more weight to an 
author’s general influence in the field than to a single much
-cited paper. To give a 
simplified example, if author A cites authors B, C, D and E in the bibliography, the raw 
data will be a file [Author_A, Author_B, Author_C, Author_D, Author_E]. From this, the 
following co-citations can be generated for this one paper: 

Author_B : Author_C 

Author_B : Author_D 

Author_B : Author_E 

Author_C : Author_D 

Author_C : Author_E 

Author_D : Author_E 
This is repeated for every paper in the corpus; and then the various co-citations can 
simply be counted to see which ones are more or less frequent. A threshold of between 
three and five co-citations will typically produce interesting results that can be 
interpreted in terms of influences among researchers and groups of researchers. Using 
the corpus of vocabulary CALL papers described above, such an analysis can be used to 
show that the field of vocabulary CALL has good links to the general applied linguistics 
research on vocabulary, but most papers cite a limited number of major authors from the 
mainstream, i.e. mostly ISP Nation, B. Laufer and a few more. The psycholinguistic 
strand of vocabulary acquisition is much less well represented in CALL. We can also see a 
certain grouping within vocabulary CALL, the clearest of which is a group of authors 
working on glosses. An example of a graphical representation of this data can be seen in 
Figure 1. 
The main methodological problems with this approach concern the setting of appropriate 
thresholds for inclusion in the graphs, and the one shown as Figure 1 is only one possible 
among many. Once the data has all been collected and entered, a certain amount of 
interpretation is needed to set the threshold, and then again to interpret the results. 

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-341- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be 
Figure 1: A graphical representation of bibliometric data for vocabulary CALL