Ever since he stumbled into doing higher education research as a young academic in the 1980s, the author has been trying to understand it as a "field" of study. His career, as a former business lecturer, then an academic developer and now an associate professor for higher education working in an Education Faculty has given him opportunities to see it from different angles. Hence, in many respects, the map the author presents in this article says as much about his own background and experiences as a higher education researcher as about the field more generally. The main point he is seeking to make through the map is the way in which higher education research is crudely split between policy-based and teaching- and learning-oriented researchers who rarely, in his experience, have much awareness of each others' scholarship. (Contains 1 figure.)