Thirty years of scholarship in JDSDE: a systematic mapping review

This study presents a journal-lifespan systematic mapping review of scholarship published in The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education (JDSDE) from 1996 to 2025. As a major interdisciplinary venue for research on Deaf individuals, language, literacy, development, and education, JDSDE provides a valuable archive for examining how the field has evolved across three decades. All issues from Volume 1 through Volume 30, Issue 1 were hand-searched, yielding 990 published items. Of these, 810 empirical articles were analyzed for participant characteristics, national and educational contexts, methodological orientations, research designs, and data sources. Publication-level variables, including article type, research focus, authorship, and collaboration patterns, were analyzed across the full corpus. Descriptive statistics and dictionary-assisted thematic mapping were used to identify overall and period-based trends. Findings show that JDSDE has sustained a strong intellectual core around sign language and linguistics, literacy and language arts, and early intervention and family, while also responding to field-level changes, including the rise of hearing technology and implants. Authorship shifted toward multi-authored and cross-institutional collaboration. Empirical articles remained centered on K-12 students, U.S.-based contexts, and quantitative designs, despite modest international, contextual, and methodological diversification.