In recent years, educational testing has gained in importance for policy initiatives, in curriculum change, as a research activity, and as a subject in the media (Forsberg & Román, 2015). One of the most active international agencies in performing educational tests is the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. Since 1995, their Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) have been carried out at regular intervals. TIMSS results, together with other tests, have gradually been transformed into reference points for social policies (Pettersson, 2014). In a wider context, the larger phenomenon of International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSA) has arisen creating a framework of global governance manifested through changes in styles of reasoning (Hacking, 1992). Given the importance of this discourse as a social practice we argue that it is crucial to investigate how ILSA-research is constructed through scholarly formats. One important way of illuminating how scientific knowledge is constructed is to study its organisation, dissemination and legitimization in terms of publishing patterns in scientific literature. Studies (Domínguez, Vieira, & Vidal, 2012; Owens, 2013) have shown how investigating research literature can be a viable and important dimension in the scientific uncovering of patterns in how research is communicated and organized at the intersection of different scientific fields. We analyse scientific patterns in a specific corpus of research made up of articles reporting or discussing TIMSS-data. The analysis is based on visualizations of bibliometric networks describing articles published in international peer-reviewed journals. A corpus of articles, limited to the most cited articles using or discussing TIMSS-data, is used. The corpus is analysed using VOSviewer software (van Eck & Waltman, 2014) which has been specifically designed to uncover bibliometric couplings. Through this analysis strategy we hope to illuminate how knowledge is legitimised within TIMSS-research. Attention will be paid to significant actors and, specifically, to those journals, authors, articles, universities and countries participating in the constituting of TIMSS-research. Preliminary analyses indicate publishing patterns where the USA is noticeable. However, there is also a wide network of dissemination within the corpus indicating that TIMSS-research may have a varied research studies base. We hope to contribute to a discussion on how educational knowledge is legitimized by its progress within the field of TIMSS-research, and how, by this process, educational assessment has become part of the constructing of scientific knowledge.

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