Where has all the Leadership Scholarship Gone?

When I began my Master of Arts in Leadership program at Royal Roads University last year one of our advisers commented that more articles on leadership had been published in the last few years than ever before. The topic came up in a discussion with some of my colleagues over lunch last week. At the time I opined that the past several years had produced the lion’s share of the work. I was curious afterwards. When, in fact, was the break point in the publication of leadership articles? Fortunately, provides excellent statistics on the searches you run there.

As you can see in the figure above the watershed moment occurred towards the end of 2004. More articles on leadership have been published in the past decade than in the previous 185 years. However, the research also revealed another interesting pattern which can be more clearly seen in the figure below.

Leadership scholarship hit an all time high in 2006. Since that peak in 2006 there has been a dramatic drop in publications related to leadership. After 2011 fewer articles have been published per year than any other time since 2001. This is surprising given we live in an age where the topic of leadership is on many minds. Leadership programs at universities, training programs, coaches, and books abound. You can’t turn around without stumbling over another blog post related to leadership, the leadership gap, or how to lead effectively. Given this, what has caused the discrepancy between academic activity and popular activity? It is not as if there has been an extinction event affecting leadership scholars. While Peter Drucker is sadly no longer with us, the likes of Senge, Oshry, Uhl-Bien, Boyatzis, and many more are all going strong.

An obvious answer does not immediately occur. Has the evolution of the scholarship pared off theories and paths of studies as dead ends from the heyday of the mid-2000's? Have the scholars moved onto to other studies? Have the editors of the journals been drawn to newer topics? This opens the door to the possibility of a more granular analysis based on articles related to complexity leadership, neuroleadership, transformational leadership, and other current topics to see which have received the focus of academic attention.

I will undertake that analysis in the near future. Until then, what thoughts do you have? Where have all of the leadership articles gone?