As a relatively new field of research, urban planning is often perceived as neither a traditional academic discipline nor a “major profession” (Schon 1983). From Taylor and Hurley’s (2015) discouraging observation that “not many people read the stuff” to Randolph’s (2013) perhaps hyperbolic suggestion that university urban research may be “reaching an end game,” there is no shortage of commentary decrying this area of scholarship. Scholars point to structural issues such as research expectations within ‘entrepreneurial universities’ and the vagaries of government-funded projects. Despite this, there is relatively little research that charts the contents of contemporary Australian urban research, focusing on the themes and topics that preoccupy scholars from this discipline. This paper uses Social Representations Theory and Pragmatic Textual Analysis to analyse the text of papers submitted to the State of Australian Cities conference since 2007. As the pre-eminent Australian conference designed to support interdisciplinary policy-related urban research, these papers are considered a proxy for the topics urban researchers deem most important. The research identified five key clusters of words that define urban research submitted to the conference. They are; transport and land use; housing affordability; triple bottom-line sustainability; qualitative research methods and; politics, governance and the planning process. This paper asserts that identifying the existing patterns and priorities of urban planning helps us to understand the direction scholarship is heading, assess how planning scholarship might fare in the future, identify research strengths and gaps and build self-awareness within the discipline.