The field of educational-leadership research has broadened over the last 50 years, with diverse knowledge-production traditions (e.g. functionalist and critical); audiences (e.g. practitioners, researchers and policymakers) and preferred sites of publication. In this article, we trace how the objectives, methods, claims and relative significance of educational-leadership research, and the identities and epistemological assumptions of educational-leadership researchers, are changing over time.

We systematically and manually analysed trends in educational-leadership research through keyword searches across all journal publication sites over 50 years, exploring researchers’ contributions, epistemological positioning and journal choices. We also explored the balance between empirical and conceptual scholarship, geographical location and use of theory. We found that critical educational-leadership research is common across the international field but is more likely to be published in high-ranking generalist education journals or lower-ranking educational-leadership-focused journals. Our research contributes a novel, robust and, significantly, relatively wide-ranging empirical basis to identify key trends, gaps and silences within the field of educational-leadership research over time. Our research enables better understanding of the areas that are potentially under-researched and the ways the field might be creating and reproducing power dynamics in research.

在过去的 50 年里，教育领导研究的领域已经扩大，具有多样化的知识生产传统（例如功能主义和批判性）；受众（例如从业者、研究人员和政策制定者）​​和首选的出版网站。在本文中，我们追溯了教育领导研究的目标、方法、主张和相对重要性，以及教育领导研究人员的身份和认识论假设是如何随着时间变化的。

50 多年来，我们通过在所有期刊出版网站上进行关键词搜索，系统地手动分析了教育领导力研究的趋势，探索了研究人员的贡献、认识论定位和期刊选择。我们还探讨了经验和概念学术、地理位置和理论使用之间的平衡。我们发现批判性教育领导力研究在国际领域很常见，但更有可能发表在高级通才教育期刊或低级教育领导力期刊上。我们的研究提供了一个新颖、强大且相对广泛的实证基础，以识别教育领导研究领域随着时间的推移的关键趋势、差距和沉默。