When someone asks where they should start their research on a topic in education, this is where I send them.

“You study education, Jeff. What does the research say about homework?” “Hey Jeff, which type of teaching is best?” “Okay Jeff, tell me the truth, are smaller class sizes really better for students?” These are the kinds of questions I get when I tell people that I study education and learning. I don’t mind them, in fact I very much enjoy talking about issues like this. But I don’t know everything and often I have to say, “Well, there’s a lot of research on that. The first place I’d look for a good review of the literature is the journal Review of Educational Research.”

Now, no journal is perfect, but I think of “RER” (as it is known) as a well-respected and rigorous journal, with a long history of producing influential synthesis of bodies of literature (full disclosure: I’m on RER’s editorial board). A recent bibliometric review by Hallinger (2023) provides further support for that sense. It’s a fascinating read about RER’s history and how bibliometric analysis can show a journal’s influence across multiple fields. According to the analysis, RER has particularly strong foci in the areas of “motivation and learning,” “teaching and learning strategies and effects,” “meta-analytic reviews and methods,” and “cognition, teaching, and learning.” When someone asks me a question about a topic in one of those areas, RER is often the first (but never the last) place I go to look for a sense of “what the research says.”

That said, the article also highlights areas where RER needs to improve. Perhaps most importantly, it remains a journal largely focused on issues in American education. There’s some small hint of a trend that the journal may be taking on a more global outlook, but much more needs to be done.

Finally, I’ll end on this note: I don’t fault the author for producing analyses of the “most influential authors” in RER, but I worry a lot about lists like that. Often the metric of “influence” is simply citation rate, which can mask a lot of issues (e.g., is the author being cited because people agree or disagree with them?) and is heavily influenced by privileges (e.g., people with resources can publish more, meaning they get cited more, etc.). And people get weird about these lists (e.g., “Why is so-and-so on there and not me?” “Person X’s work is better than person Y’s work!” etc.). I prefer analyzing things at a more macro-level, such as which journals are producing work that gets cited often in other well-cited journals. Knowledge-creation requires coherence across sources, and this article shows RER has produced work that has driven the field toward more coherent knowledge. Kudos!