Adventure education and outdoor learning: examining journal trends since 2000

Academic journals should reflect currency in a subject area or discipline. Relatively quick response times from submission to publication enable journals to capture the dynamic nature of a discipline more readily than many other forms of academic literature. Additionally, unique publications such as special issues offer the potential to embrace a range of papers from cognate areas, which may reveal and deepen a discipline’s understanding of wider contemporary questions and issues. The Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning incorporating Outdoor Adventure Education and Experiential Learning (EOE) is presented and its position as a gatekeeper, publishing quality international papers, is appraised. An empirical key word analysis of the journal was conducted and the results were analysed critically against perceived trends in the subject area more generally. This process enables an examination of emerging foci and pedagogy in Europe since 2000 through journal emphases, and considers the significance of the journal as a signpost of, and to, the field.