An internationalised Europe and regionally focused Americas: A network analysis of higher education studies

Abstract

The study on which this article reports investigated the internationalisation of higher education studies by examining collaborations in the form of international coauthorships. We analyse how network-based mechanisms, related to structural relationship between authors (preferential attachment, i.e., higher tendency to collaborate among the most productive ones) and node level features (homophily, i.e., tendency to collaborate with similar others), affect higher education co-authorship networks. We build a bipartite co-authorship network based on 17,262 publications from 33 specialised higher education journals indexed in Scopus from 1996-2018. Scientific collaboration in higher education mainly occurs within national borders. We found that higher education is not an internationally oriented field of research, with around 90% single-country publications. A geographical divide was observed between the two largest communities (Europe, Asia and Oceania vs. the Americas) which was also reflected in the research themes addressed by these communities, structured around the known divide between (1) learning and teaching, and (2) policy-based studies. Preferential attachment was observed to be a network-based mechanism that contributes to drive the formation of new co-authorships. Similarly, homophily based on academic seniority and research productivity emergedThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

An evolving international research collaboration network: spatial and thematic developments in co-authored higher education research, 1998–2018

“…Our joint bibliometric and network analyses show dynamic patterns of collaboration among countries, yet the expansion is mediated by the narrow structure of international co-authorships. While (many) more countries have joined the network, especially over the latter decade analyzed , they tend to gravitate around a small group of central, largely Anglophone, countries-where the leading researchers are based-and this reflects the field's persistent stratification (see also Vlegels & Huisman, 2020;Akbaritabar & Barbato, 2021;Avdeev, 2021). Such results should be read carefully since our sample of journals and articles is based on English language journals.…”

“…Analyzing 34 co-authorship networks based on articles in 28 journals, Vlegels and Huisman (2020) find high fragmentation and increasing inequality resulting from the field's hierarchical structure with a clear center and innumerable peripheral co-authorship teams. Akbaritabar and Barbato's (2021) network analysis, based on Scopus data, confirms the divide between Europe's internationalized higher education journals and the less open North American journals. Avdeev (2021), analyzing geographic and linguistic proximity also using Scopus data, shows major English-speaking countries, Western Europe, and China as key areas for higher education research.…”

“…1 shows the research articles published in the selected 13 prominent journals in the field (methodological details described below) indicating that, in the two decades since 1998, higher education research has grown exponentially (confirming Vlegels & Huisman, 2020). And similar to scientific research generally, accompanying this expansion is a steady increase in higher education researchers working together across country boundaries (Akbaritabar & Barbato, 2021;Avdeev, 2021).…”

“…However, Scopus allows far fewer data records (up to 2000 full records) to be manually downloaded per query session. Also, in the downloaded records from Scopus, there can be considerable variation in the way in which cited references are formatted, e.g., the cited references are not well normalized (Van Eck & Waltman, 2020; see also Akbaritabar & Barbato, 2021). It would be less reliable to use the cited references for bibliographic coupling computation based on Scopus data, which is crucial for grouping journals and papers for the purposes of this study, as we do not have access to disambiguated Scopus data.…”

“…Growth in co-authored scientific publications worldwide across the sciences has been exponential, yet more slowly in the social sciences (Mosbah-Natanson & Gingras, 2013;Powell et al, 2017). If co-authorships across national and cultural boundaries are also increasingly prominent in higher education (HE), this multidisciplinary field, increasingly theoretically and methodologically sophisticated, has only become collaborative over the past two decades-with important, persistent regional and country differences (e.g., Akbaritabar & Barbato, 2021;Avdeev, 2021;Kwiek, 2020a;Marginson, 2021). Global networks increasingly connect higher education's many organizational forms and researchers, especially those working internationally and comparatively (Kosmützky & Krücken, 2014).…”