Design-Related and Design-Focused Research: A Study of Publication Patterns in Design Journals

• Acknowledges the performance of those universities and scholars that made a significant contribution to the development of design as an academic discipline in the period 2000–2009.
• Guides (potentially) design professionals to choose partners to cooperate with in design research.

In this paper we examine publication patterns in peer-reviewed journals that publish design research. Our data consists of 4727 articles and their citations as published in 11 journals over a ten-year period (2000–2009). These 11 journals are classified as either design-related or design-focused, depending on whether they specialize in design research or related disciplines. Our research findings suggest that the research community publishing in design-related journals is, for the larger part, made up of different institutions and scholars than the research community focusing on design-focused journals. The design-focused journals seem to be less impactful than the design-related journals. Top authors from the design-focused community tend to publish more papers in the design-related journals than the other way around.