Abstract
This article traces authorship and citation patterns in The Writing Center Journal ( WCJ) from 1980 to 2009, a data set that consists of 241 WCJ articles containing 4,095 total citations. What these data demonstrate is that WCJ has been dominated by single-authored articles that are citing sources that largely appear just once -except for Stephen North's "The Idea of a Writing Center," which appears in nearly every third article's list of works cited -and that the most frequent source for citations is WCJ itself. This inward gaze is an indication of a tight-knit genealogy, an unpromising present that does not quite seem healthy for the biodiversity of future generations, as well as a missed opportunity to oifer writing centers as sites of intellectual engagement to composition studies as whole.