The Unpromising Present of Writing Center Studies: Author and Citation Patterns in the Writing Center Journal, 1980 to 2009

Abstract

Consider an academic field in which the flagship journal -over the course of its 30-year history -has by and large featured single-authored articles despite an ethos of collaborative work.Also consider that these articles either rely on citations that are not taken up by subsequent authors or refer to a set of "insider" readings that function largely to affirm established beliefs and run the risk of casting the field as largely talking to itself, not to be taken seriously by related and affiliated fields.Finally, consider that in that same flagship journal, over 80% of its contributing authors over those 30 years make just a single appearance, a mark, perhaps, that publication in this field is a one-time occurrence, a quick stop on the way to publishing in more venerable venues or that those authors are "one-hit wonders," unlikely to continue research and publication in a field dominated by practitioner knowledge.That field, of course, is writing center studies; the publication, The Writing Center Journal .In this article, I trace authorship and citation patterns in The Writing Center Journal ( WCJ ), from its inception in 1980 (issue 1.1) to its 57th issue in 2009 (29.2). 1 My data set consists of 241 WCJ articles containing 4,095 total citations over that 30-year time period.What these data demonstrate is that WCJ has been dominated by single-authored articles that are citing sources that largely appear just once -except for Stephen North's "The Idea of a Writing Center," which appears in nearly every third article's list of works cited -and the most frequent source for citations is WCJ itself.That articles previously appearing in WCJ are by far the articles most likely to be cited in WCJ is one indication of an inward gaze or a tight-knit genealogy that does not quite seem healthy for the biodiversity of future generations.Another is the relative scarcity of WCJ articles in the works cited lists of more general composition 1 Rather than include a separate methodology section, I describe my methods in this footnote, mostly because what I did, though labor intensive, is quite straightforward: I created a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing the author(s), title, volume, and date of articles appearing in WCJ from vol. 1.1 (1980) to 29.2 (2009).I included only articles that contained citations, 241 total.In contrast, the database CompPile.orgcontains 325 individual pieces appearing in WCJ from 1980 to 2009.For this study, I excluded articles that did not include a list of works cited, whether articles, book reviews, letters to the editor, or editors' introductions.In addition, I recorded in that spreadsheet every citation listed in each article's works cited section, and that information included author(s) of cited work, title of cited work, collection or journal that the cited work appeared in (if applicable), and the year of publication of the cited work.To do the counting that is at the heart of my analysis, I primarily relied on the PivotTable function of Excel.Charts were similarly created via Excel.

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