Research on research trends - always fun!

They looked at 12 years of data from 42 journals on applied linguistics - including e.g. ReCALL, CALL, LL&T.

They extracted topics from all research papers in these 42 journals & looked at how trends developed over the 12 years (2005-2008, 2009-2012, 2013-2016). "Multilingualism" as a topic is in the "up & coming" categor" [Diagram: 3 columns with normalized freq, chi-value, p).

Also, if you want to know who is the Applied linguistics equivalent of Michael Jackson, uhm, Tokio Hotel, uhm... well, whatever the current hot sh*t is in music: They have a list of "Top 20 most highly cited publications".

Fun fact: In the Applied Linguistics billboard charts of 2013-2016, García scored a very respectable 8th place with García, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century. A global perspective. Wiley-Blackwell.

Fits well with the observation that "Multilingualism" is up & coming as topic in applied linguistics.

And then they provide a list of top 20 most highly cited punlications from 2005-2016. In case you are uncertain whom to stan:
Dörnyei; García; Clahsen & Felser; Goldberg; R. Ellis; Blommaert: Dörnyei (again!); Lantolf; Shohamy; R. Ellis (again!) & Loewen & Erlam; ...

... N. Ellis, Montrul, Larsen-Freeman & Cameron; Lyster, Swain, De Bot & Lowie & Verspoor; Baayen & Davidson & Bates; Creece & Blackledge; R. Ellis (again again!); Borg.

Rod Ellis is obviously a Beatles-level applied linguist

And: "The increased interest in bilingual education and language policy is shown by Garcia’s (2009) Bilingualism in the 21st Century (ranked the 8th most highly cited publications in the 4 years of 2013–16), as well as....

... Creece and Blackledge’s ‘Translanguaging in the bilingual
classroom’ article and Shohamy’s (2006) Language Policy book (both making the list of the top 20 most highly cited publications that appeared since 2005)."

So, if anybody wants to get the paper to check if they made it into one of their top-of-the-pops lists:
Lei, L., & Liu, D. (2019). Research Trends in Applied Linguistics from 2005 to 2016: A Bibliometric Analysis and Its Implications. Applied Linguistics, 40(3), 540–561.

And the DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amy003