Using the proceedings of six European IFSA Symposia, we analyse the themes that were central in these Symposia as well as trends in number of papers and authors. We then assess 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 generating maps which graphically represent how key-words are linked, and allows identifying thematic clusters. The dynamic of key-words in the period 1991-2007 is also analysed, thus allowing to identifying which keywords were of central importance during which period. It shows how themes such as sustainability emerge, disappear and re-emerge under a different guise. The various analyses are provided to further the reflexivity of the IFSA community, especially regarding its publication practices and thus its efforts to make results from Farming Systems Research widely available.