Language Teaching Research Quarterly

There is a strong need to understand Diane Larsen-Freeman’s main research interests and to investigate the theories and thesis she put forth. Moreover, it seems necessary to examine her contribution to applied linguistics and understand the claims and criticisms she has made throughout her career. This study aims to present an analysis of her studies within the scope of research trends, themes, topics, documents, and sources. Within the scope of the retrospective scientometric approach, 56 research papers from the Web of Science (WOS) database were analyzed. The results showed that Larsen-Freeman published her studies in the time span between 1987 and 2022. The most productive years can be considered in two periods, namely the years between 2006 - 2012 and 2015 - 2020. It was also concluded that the most relevant sources were published in reputational journals in the field of Applied Linguistics. The last conclusion was that Larsen-Freeman who has a high value of h index is an influential scholar in the field of Applied Linguistics, mainly focused on chaos/complexity science, complexity, second language acquisition, complex adaptive system, fluency, accuracy, and language emergence.