On 9 September 2016, the Triennial Conference of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) hosted a symposium on ‘The politics of publishing in research journals within the field of adult education and learning’. For the occasion, the editors of five research-based journals in adult, continuing and lifelong education had been invited to reflect on and debate two issues: How do articles submitted to and published in these journals contribute to constructing the ‘field’ of adult education and to shaping ‘trends’ within it? In what ways do these journals see themselves as ‘international’, and what geographical and linguistic concerns come with such an attribution or aspiration? The journals were the Adult Education Quarterly (AEQ), a US-based journal published by SAGE on behalf of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education; Studies in Continuing Education (SiCE), an Australian-based journal published by Taylor & Francis; Studies in the Education of Adults (SiEA), a UK-based journal published by Taylor & Francis in association with the Standing Conference on University Research and Teaching in the Education of Adults, and our own International Journal of Lifelong Education (IJLE). The organiser himself is an editor of the European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults (RELA), a more recently established research-based journal hosted by a Swedish university, but published on behalf of ESREA.