Tracking our writing theorists through citations

Working between bibliometrics and theories in the sociology of knowledge, this research demonstrates a method for aggregating and studying the content of citations in order to both quantitatively capture and qualitatively describe significant patterns in the uses of prominent writing theorists and their books over time. Realized specifically as a tool for use across composition-rhetoric, this approach expands our ability to reflexively monitor how highly cited authors and their texts have "acoustic dimensions" that influence knowledge making and breaking across the field. Given the results that this kind of research produces, we can better appreciate the historical and evolving leverage that these "knowledge assets" represent and therefore be more informed and convincing participants in the discourse communities through which we, collectively, act to advance knowledge. Demonstrations of this novel approach to citation research were applied to the education and discourse theorist James Moffett and his (1968) book Teaching the universe of discourse..