IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication: Looking to the Past to Discover the Present

Discipline maturity and, more often, discipline development are recurrent themes in technical and professional communication scholarship. This paper reviews 25 years of the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication in terms of how and who creates knowledge. Specifically, we identify methods used by whom in an attempt to explore how the journal has developed complexity. We posit that the journal has evolved from describing practice to positing theory and finally to employing empirical research methods to evaluate theoretical application.