Abstract
<jats:p>Modern educational research increasingly relies on large-scale data from digital learning platforms (DLPs) to run experiments and reduce data-collection costs, giving rise to an emerging "DLPs-as-research-infrastructure" subfield. Lacking a dedicated journal or scholarly society, this fragmented community is distributed across diverse venues and disciplines. To map its social ties, intellectual foundations, and adjacent research, we conducted an exploratory, multi-level bibliometric analysis. Using the organizers of the Annual Workshop on A/B Testing and Platform-Enabled Learning Research as a seed corpus, we applied three complementary methods: co-authorship networks, bibliographic coupling, and semantic embeddings via advanced language models. Our findings reveal a small, conceptually coherent, but institutionalized and dispersed subcommunity rooted in diverse intellectual lineages like intelligent tutoring systems and learning analytics. Crucially, network simulation demonstrated that workshop publications serve as vital structural bridges, significantly reducing distance across separate research clusters. This work provides a descriptive snapshot of the DLP-as-research-infrastructure movement and offers a replicable methodological framework for other emerging domains to identify, unify, and scale their scholarly communities.</jats:p>