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Using the proceedings of six European IFSA Symposia, we analysed the themes that were central in these Symposia as well as trends from a number of papers and authors. We then assessed the wider domain of agricultural research based on a corpus extracted from the CAB and SCI databases of the Web of Knowledge. The co-word analysis allows the generation of maps which graphically represent how keywords are linked, and allows the identification of thematic clusters. The dynamic of keywords in the period 1991–2007 was also analysed, thus allowing the identification of keywords which were of central importance during different periods. This showed how themes such as sustainability emerged, disappeared and re-emerged under different guises. The various analyses are provided to further the reflexivity of the IFSA community, especially regarding its publication practices and thus its efforts to …