An Economy of Publication and Citations and the Anglophication of Educational Research
Author(s):
Andreas Fejes (presenting / submitting) Erik Nylander
Conference:
ECER 2014
Network:
23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Format:
Paper

Session Information

23 SES 04 E, Research Policies and the Politics of Research (Part 3)

Paper Session: continued from 23 SES 02 E, 23 SES 03 E

Time:
2014-09-03
09:00-10:30
Room:
B338 Sala de Aulas
Chair:
Palle Rasmussen

Contribution

What can be measured can be compared, and what can be compared can more easily be managed. Academic publishing is undergoing major shifts that are impacting the publication patterns of both collective and individual researchers. One of the more influential shifts in recent times is the emergence of an ‘economy of publication and citations’ (EPC) (Larsson, 2009; 2010). As Larsson (2009) has argued forcefully, publications in academic journals—especially those categorized as international journals included in the dominating databases such as the Web of Science and Scopus—are of increasing importance to the scientific communities around the world because politicians and university administrations tie the distribution of material and scholarly assets (money as well as merit) immediately to the symbolic tokens of the EPC. When research funding, promotions, and career trajectories become more dependent on the extent and impact of published papers, issues of what ‘counts’ and what becomes recognized as scholarly content in articles are underscored. It also leads to the question of who is allowed to enter those arenas that ‘count’ in the EPC.

 

This article aims to empirically investigate the bibliometric logic of one field within educational research: the field of adult education research, particularly in relation to the geography of authorships. We base this study on data from publications and citations in three main journals in the field: Adult Education Quarterly (AEQ), International Journal of Lifelong Education (IJLE), and Studies in Continuing Education (SICE). By gathering aggregated statistics based on publications in these journals between the years 2005 and 2012, we will scrutinize the extent to which the emerging EPC is dependent on national and regional boundaries. Our analysis will provide results that indicate who contributes to these journals and who is picked up as worth citing. The results will also help characterize the national characteristics of the few top publishing countries. By ‘objectifying’ publication channels, which are often taken-for-granted, we hope to provide a ground for scientific reflexivity as dominant structures are identified and exposed (cf. Bourdieu, 1988, p. xii).  

The following research questions will be addressed more fully in our analysis:

  • What are the geographical and institutional affiliations of all authors, and how do the affiliations of top-cited contributions differ from the full sample of publications?
  • What is the (trans)national flow of publications between the countries with the highest share of publications (measured by institutional affiliations)? 

Method

We have conducted a simple bibliometric analysis of citation patterns within the field of the education and learning of adults, and as represented by these three journals: AEQ, IJLE, and SICE. The bibliometric overview provides a comparison between the full body of publications appearing in these journals between the years 2005 and 2012 and those publications that have gathered the most citations within each journal. We have focused on the period 2005–2012 in order to provide a contemporary analysis of how the field operates. We also venture to suggest that this is a period where the EPC was emerging and permeating into academia. Our focus on academic journals is centred on the premise that academic publishing provides one important knowledge base for any discipline or field of research. A research journal represents a publication output where papers that have been refereed and deemed to have reached a certain level of rigour and quality are published (cf. Buboltz, Miller & Williams, 1999; Tseng & Tsay, 2013). This is in contrast to book chapters and books that are less likely to have to go through such a rigorous collegial peer-review process (although they sometimes are). In other words, publishers play a major role in the dissemination of knowledge and academic communities tend to regard refereed journals as important publication channels, a propensity that is further emphasized through a series of current political reforms connected to the EPC. A second important reason for our choice of using journal publications as our unit of analysis is that many journals are indexed in databases that provide a basis for generating bibliometric data. Our data has been generated through the database Scopus. Besides being one of the main indexing databases in the academic community – partly because it uses certain quality procedures when including journals – the reason for choosing this database is foremost pragmatic. First, the three journals selected to represent the field—AEQ (United States), IJLE (United Kingdom), and SICE (Australia)— are all listed in Scopus, whereas only two of them, AEQ and SICE, are listed in the Web of Science. Second, these three journals represent three different geographical locations, in terms of both country and continent and could provide some differences in terms of geographical affiliations of authors as well as present the opportunity to identify the academic flow of publications across national borders.

Expected Outcomes

The results illustrate how the vast majority of all articles have a first author from one of the four Anglophone countries: the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Together, they represent 66% of all published articles. When focusing on the share of most cited articles, we can see how authors from the four mentioned countries together have authored an astonishing 87.8% of the top-cited articles. Comparing the share of published articles with the share of those with highest citations, we can see how UK and Australian authors have high revenues in the field — that is, they have the highest share of highly cited articles compared to their share of the total number of publications.Further, the result illustrate how authors from the four Anglophone countries to a large extent, publish their articles in the journal that originates from the same geographical location. UK authors publish 69% of their articles in the UK-based journal IJLE, US authors publish 62% of their articles in the US-based journal AEQ, and the Australian authors publish 54% of their articles in the Australian-based journal SICE. Canadians somewhat diverge from this pattern, however, by publishing 44% of their articles in IJLE, and ‘only’ 39% in AEQ. We can see how the transnational flow of publications across continents is surprisingly low. For example, the AEQ is a common outlet for US and Canadian authors (62% and 39% respectively), while Australian authors publish only a small share (7%) of their articles in AEQ. Further, US authors publish their work to a very small extent (7%) in the Australian-based SICE, while the Canadians publish to a little higher extent (17%). The results thus seem to suggest that North American and Australian scholars within adult education do not tend to disseminate their scientific findings across the two continents.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buboltz, W.C., Miller, M., & Williams, D.J. (1999). Content analysis of research in the ‘Journal of Counseling Psychology’. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 46(4), 496-503. Larsson, S. (2010). Invisible colleges in the adult education research world. European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Research, 1(1-2), 97-112. Larsson, S. (2009). An emerging economy of publications and citations. Nordisk Pedagogik, 29(1), 34-52. Tseng, Y-H., & Tsay, M-Y. (2013). Journal clustering of library and information science for subfield delineation using the bibliometric analysis toolkit: CATAR. Scientometrics, 95(2), 503-528.

Author Information

Andreas Fejes (presenting / submitting)
Linköping University, Sweden
Erik Nylander
Linköping University, Sweden

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