Geography's changing lexicon: measuring disciplinary change in Anglophone human geography through journal content analysis

Abstract Much writing on changing trends in geographical practices is based on subjective interpretations of the discipline’s scholarly output. This paper introduces a data source which provides quantitative information on the discipline’s lexicon through full-text searching of the contents of five of the discipline’s major Anglophone journals. Analysis of the large data set identifies two main trends in geography’s language and practices during the period 1950–1998: one group of terms associated with quantitative work became prominent in the 1970s but declined in relative importance thereafter – though by no means disappearing from the lexicon; the other, comprising a range of terms generally associated with cultural and social geography, increased in prominence from the 1980s on.

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