Celebrating Higher Education’s 50 years: trends, absences, and opportunities

Abstract

The journal, Higher Education (HE), was established in 1972 and is currently one of the leading international journals in higher education studies. By using bibliometric techniques, a systematic review, and a social network analysis, this review article provides an overview of the main patterns of publications in HE during its history. The findings show that (i) the volume of articles has been continuously increasing, with a particular marked uplift since 2007; (ii) while single-authored articles have dominated the publication pattern, collaborative articles have shown a particular growth over the last decade; (iii) the USA, the UK, and Australia have dominated the journal in terms of the number of articles, international collaboration, and the most prolific authors; (iv) while Chinese authors have become more evident, there has been a near-absence of contributions from Latin America, Eastern Europe, and most of Africa; (v) in the entire history of HE , there has been a gender imbalance (in favour of male authors) across the most cited articles, but this pattern has changed in the last decade and; (vi) both teaching and learning and system policy have been key research themes in the journal although internationalisation and the student experience have recently gained traction. These patterns of publication in HE , with their imbalances and absences, suggest several challenges ahead. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10734-022-00924-7.

Exploring the development of higher education research topics in the last two decades: Seven patterns

“…Our findings in this study, along with this clear trend in the literature, indicate that higher education research is increasingly diverse in terms of topics covered. This argument also echoes the discussions provided in recent studies (Cantwell et al, 2022;Guzmán-Valenzuela et al, 2022) that higher education research has developed significantly in the last decades and that increasingly more studies by more diverse researchers from different parts of the world are publishing in higher education journals.…”

“…Hence, higher education studies developed as a significant area of research in the US first, and the body of literature in the US is larger and older than others (Tight, 2007). However, the importance of higher education is growing globally (Guzmán-Valenzuela et al, 2022;Marginson, 2016). Thus, the general expectation would be that the area of higher education research will follow suit and have a more globally inclusive perspective.…”

Understanding the growing contributions of China to leading international higher education journals

“…Prior research suggests that higher education research "has been especially nationally oriented and strongly rooted in higher education systems" (Guzmán-Valenzuela et al, 2022, p. 1188, a feature that was also noted by Tight (2014) in the broad field of education studies. However, our data shows that among the articles published by Chinese scholars in the three journals, international collaborative articles dominated the publication pattern.…”

“…Based on an analysis of publications from 33 core higher education journals indexed in Scopus from 1996 to 2018, Akbaritabar and Barbato (2021) discovered that 90% of the publications were authored by institutions within a single country, while only 10% were authored by institutions from two or more countries. In their analysis of the published articles in Higher Education from 1972 to 2022, Guzmán-Valenzuela et al (2022) showed that 44.5% of articles had a single author, 44.6% were authored within a single country, and only 10.9% were international collaborative articles. Finally, the field of higher education exhibits significant imbalances.…”

“…Between 2008 and 2017, China contributed only 4.2% of the publications in ten core higher education journals within the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) database (Li & Li, 2018). While several studies have highlighted the growing presence of Chinese authors in international higher education journals (e.g., Guzmán-Valenzuela et al, 2022;Kwiek, 2021), these studies often focus on the overall distribution of authors' country affiliation, bypassing the unique nuances within individual countries. There is a lack of systematic evidence concerning China's growing contribution to international higher education journals, as well as a limited understanding of the factors driving this growth.…”