This review study was designed to map out the research trends through an intensive text analysis of 7525 research articles (RAs) of Applied Linguistics during the past thirty years (from 1986 to 2015). RAs were coded and analyzed by four analysts to identify their content of research, research methods, and statistical procedures. It was found that there has been an increase in the number and the average length of articles. The extensive review of the RAs also revealed a broad range of themes that belonged to fourteen research domains. Of the total content areas, SLA was found to be the most frequent area (20.82%). Language Teaching Methodology (17.17%), Psycholinguistics (16.89%), Language Testing (7.65%), and Technology and Language Learning (6.63%) were other areas which received much attention. These areas reflect the well-established fields of inquiry which contain an abundance of subareas for research. Results of analysis for determining the major trends of research methods in Applied Linguistics RAs showed that, empirical studies (83.23%) were by far the most frequent studies. Non-empirical studies were only present in (16.77%) RAs. Among the empirical studies quantitative studies (48%) were more frequent than qualitative (29.02%) and mixed-methods (6.21%) studies. Regarding the statistical techniques, results showed that descriptive statistics (40.04%) were by far the most commonly use technique followed by one-way ANOVA (14.91%), t-test (10.15%), and Pearson correlation (8.76%). Regarding the sophistication level of statistical use, about 78.77% of the techniques were classified as basic, 14.49% as intermediate, and 6.74% as advanced. Clearly, most of the techniques were either basic or intermediate, with a significant higher percentage for the former. So, a person with basic knowledge of statistics could understand 69.03% of the papers published during 1986 to 2015.
