This study examines research publication and trends in instructional design, as found in selected professional journals during the period 1980-2008. Citation analysis was used to investigate documents relating to instructional design, as indexed in the "Web of Science. Instructional design; instruction design; educational design; learning design; teaching design; ID," etc, were the key phrases used for searching the documents, and a total of 758 analysed documents were judged relevant to the field of instructional design. The results of the study were explored according to the journal of publication; document type; year of publication; author; author affiliation; country of publication; most frequently used words and phrases; subject; language; cited by years and "h" index rating. Notable findings include the most frequently used key words and phrases (after "instructional design", these are "cognitive load theory" and "worked examples"); regarding subject area, "education, educational research", and "educational psychology" dominate. With regards to country of origin, 87% of authors came from only 7 countries, with countries in the Far East being poorly represented. (Contains 7 tables and 4 figures.)