Through an examination of the technical and professional writing profession as it defines itself and through a citation analysis of its journals, this thesis highlights the literature, identifies access problems, and suggests some strategies for confronting bibliographic obstacles. After a brief introductory chapter, the second chapter of the thesis examines how the discipline defines itself through its professional associations, the characteristics of its practitioners, and its place in the univesity. The third chapter presents a citation analysis of the eight core journals published in 1990 and 1980 and reports that: (1) although academic programs in technical and professional communication are physically positioned in humanities units, the research literature resembles that of that of social science; (2) the interdisciplinary connections of this literature are to social science disciplines, with the exception of English and computer science; (3) the citations indicate that there are two distinct but not mutually exclusive subdisciplines, business communication and technical communication; and (4) there was a vast increase in the number of citations per article in all the journals. The fourth chapter of the thesis details general and specific problems of bibliographic control for a discipline thus defined, proposing some strategies for confronting bibliographic obstacles. Fourteen tables and six figures of data are included; 50 references are attached. (RS)