Abstract Corpus-based studies (CBSs) have played a pivotal role in the realm of Applied Linguistics (AL) in recent years. However, few studies have considered the study quality of CBSs. Therefore, the present study tried to probe the main targeted features in 2328 CBSs published in 22 AL journals from 1986 to 2016. The results revealed that the most frequent linguistic feature was lexis, followed by grammar. Other targeted features were discourse, pragmatics, phonetic, semantic, respectively. The results also showed that Lexis and grammar had a decreasing trend and discourse and pragmatics features had a growing trend over the past three decades of analysis. This study put forward several implications and suggestions to improve the quality of CBSs in terms of linguistic targeted features
