The Qualitative Report 2013 Volume 18, Article 55, 1-14 http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR18/infante55.pdf Toddling Towards Childhood: A Bibliometric Analysis of the First QROM Lustrum (2006-2010) Eduardo Infante University of Seville, Spain The first years in the life of a journal are the most difficult ones as editors need to advertise it effectively and attract worldwide researchers to safeguard its launch and maintenance. This study provides a bibliometric analysis of the first lustrum of the journal Qualitative Research in Organizational and Management (QROM) in an attempt to assess its production both in methodological and conceptual terms. The sample was made up of 66 articles by 109 (co-)authors from 66 institutions. A total of 53.2% of contributors were female and were responsible for 42.4% of the single-authored articles (compare to 34.8% of only-male articles). Eight “invisible schools,”, 37.5% national ones, were obtained by relating authors to sharing co-authors (grade 1), institutions (grade 2) or cities (grade 3). The most productive authors were Cassell, Grandy, and McKenna, the first two being developers of invisible schools. The number of articles, theoretical perspectives, and diversity of applied techniques has increased in QROM over the lustrum period with UK and Canada as most prolific countries followed by USA, Sweden, and Australia. Most articles dealt with organizational and managerial issues under discourses or narrative perspectives using interviews and sense-making theories. The evolution of these findings is also presented. Keywords: Bibliometric Analysis, Qualitative Research in Organizational and Management (QROM), Lustrum Introduction There comes a time when researchers participating in the development of a study field need to look back and consider what have been achieved and how. This exercise is even more necessary when the scientific production is devoted to a relatively new area of research and comes from a brand new journal. As once expressed by Kluckhohn (1949), it would hardly be the fish that discovered the existence of water in the same way that a researcher loses its own conscience while researching and publishing on his/her topics. To overcome this unawareness of identity which could endanger the coherent advance of a discipline, bibliometric analyses could provide editors and researchers with historical traces of what has been achieved so far and what still remains uncovered. Bibliometric analyses are related to a set of methods used to study and measure texts and information of a given source (Allen & Reser, 1990; Shubert & Glänzel, 1991). The term "bibliometrics" was first introduced in 1969 to describe the field of study concerned with the application of mathematical models and statistics to research, and quantify the process of written communication. It helps to take notice of what topics and what scientific terms and approaches are being used to address them. In some cases we might find ourselves devoting much of our time in the same study objects or narrowing our perspectives by just using a single limited approach. On the other hand, we may come across a huge diversity of issues, approaches, and techniques with little integration that could strengthen or enlarge our scientific field. In both cases, bibliometric analyses can provide us with suitable guidance to promote new insights in the realm of scientific production or to integrate existing ones thoughtfully (Davis & Cronin, 1993; Zubeidat, Desvarieux, Salamanca & Sierra, 2004).