44

This is the sixth article in the section dedicated to the observation of Francophone research on adult education. It first provides the updated list (up to 15 April 2020) of the 174 theses identified in the Sudoc inter-university database as explicitly mentioning this field and defended since 1 January 2010 (39 of which were defended after 1 January 2018). Knowing that this type of bibliometric search only automatically returns about 50% of the theses deemed interesting by researchers in the field, this article also seeks to identify a second circle gathering this time others theses: those of which a significant part is devoted to key issues in this field, without the thesis being 100% dedicated to research in adult education. As a result, it describes and characterizes around the hard core, a second circle of 444 theses (including 82 since 2018), the reading of which is also of interest to researchers in adult education. These were identified using a two-stage method: first, a pool of all the theses whose juries included jurors identified as “guarantors of adult education” was compiled. Subsequently, those theses whose summaries were close to seven themes representative of adult education research were extracted by machine learning.