| In the academic world, citations can provide insights into the impact of a particular theoretical orientation on scholarship in a field of study, showing epistemological shifts as numbers of citations to that theory increase or diminish. This study explored the impact of the transactional theory of reading, articulated by Louise Rosenblatt, (e.g., 1938/1968, 1978), on scholarship in reading research and education over a 38-year period. The approach consisted of tabulating and analyzing citations in 154 articles from three major journals— Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Literacy Research (formerly Journal of Reading Behavior), and Reading Teacher. The latter journal was included to gain insights into the theory's movement from a researcher audience to a practitioner audience. The time period covered was 1969, when Rosenblatt was first cited in one of the journals, to 2007, two years after her death.;Of Rosenblatt's total corpus of publications, citations were made to 23 of them. Most highly cited was The Reader, the Text, the Poem, Rosenblatt's fullest theoretical statement, and next was her earlier book, Literature as Exploration. In addition to these books, seven articles were cited in all three journals. Together these nine works create a kind of "canon" of transactional theory for reading scholars and educators. An examination of patterns over the years showed that in the mid 1980s citations began to rise and continued to do so into the 1990s. Polynomial regression analyses revealed that, overall, the trends were linear in nature, but, for one journal, Journal of Literacy Research, there was a curvilinear trend. Writers of the articles citing Rosenblatt referred to her "stance" notion more than any other aspect of the theory and, in some cases, identified her work as a "reader response" theory. Evaluative commentary surrounding the citations appeared only in Reading Teacher..;These findings are contextualized into historical developments in the field, and suggestions are made for further research using citation analysis to study theoretical movements. |
