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After two investigations of PhD theses, this third article explores publications uploaded in the HAL “open archive” system in two parallel ways. A first corpus is obtained through research into generic terms such as “adult education”, “adult training”, “lifelong learning” or “lifelong education”; a second one is obtained via a collection of queries for significant terms extracted from the summary of Carré et Caspar’s Traité des sciences de la formation (3rd ed., 2011). The generic corpus reveals 172 separate publications whereas the one resulting from the Traité collects 1182 ( i.e. eight times more, with only 55 in common). The first conclusion is that in HAL (as in Sudoc cf. n? 1), most publications (here 85%) are too sharply indexed to be retrieved by a single general query. Another conclusion is that – even if the various meanings of the field fluctuate widely – the “adult education” field in HAL shows a quite stable triple central nucleus (“technology and pedagogy”, “certification and validation” and “socio-economics of training”) that is preserved in the sample represented by the small generic corpus.