The background of this paper is the interplay between science and society in the larger field of educational research on the educational agora (cf. Nowotny et. al., 2001). The specific aim of the paper is to map the field of reading and literacy research in order to find how science ‘act’ in creating phenomena as objects of truth (Lindblad, Pettersson and Popkewitz, 2018). The paper starts with a common hypothesis on that the research field under scrutiny previously was aligned to a reasoning on reading as a mean for the formation of the educated citizen into becoming a question of creating productive individuals for the development of economical and societal desires (cf. Tierney & Pearson, 2021). In performing this task, we therefore started out with a question on if we could see this change of values represented as a tradition of ‘Bildung’ transmogrified into the notion of ‘literacy’, and with that, if ‘numbers’, normally used and tabulated on within literacy research are becoming more important than ‘words’, normally used within reading research for making arguments on reading. Another way to state this observation is to ask when quantitively explanations became more important than qualitative explorations within this field of research, and in line with this – who are they addressing and based on what scientific traditions? To investigate this, the paper performs a systematic review for investigating changes, research fronts and geographies as well as different trajectories and scientific traditions over time (1980-2022). The research articles used (n: 750) are articles within a specific scientific journal (Journal of Reading Behaviour, renamed in 1996 as Journal of Literacy Research) that are peer-reviewed, written in English, and presented within the Web of Science. In mapping, coding and analyzing the articles, maps were constructed for investigating the reading and literacy research field over time with its changes, fronts, geographies, trajectories, and traditions. The result of the study shows how reading research and literacy research develops into distinct fields based on different research traditions but also how these traditions ‘speaks’ to the society in different ways; reading research more commonly address other researchers within the same field, while literacy research to a larger extent address actors outside of the scientific field, such as policymakers, stakeholders, and politicians.

Lindblad, S., Pettersson, D., & Popkewitz, T. (2018). Education By the Numbers and the Making of Society : The Expertise of International Assessments. New York: Routledge. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. & Gibbons, M. (2001) Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Polity Press. Tierney, R. J. & Pearson, P. D. (2021). A History of Literacy Education: Waves of Research and Practice. Teachers College Press.