In recent years, the interest in and use of secondary research to synthesise evidence in education has grown considerably. While systematic reviews often aim to analyse a large corpus of studies, educational technology research often focuses on very specific and locally targeted contexts, with nationally or linguistically defined communities (Marín et al., in press). As such, in their methodological development and adaptation to educational research, evidence syntheses have not yet sufficiently taken into account and reflected key aspects such as research context and the language of publication (Zawacki-Richter et al., 2020). This implies potential biases with regard to the associated visibility, validity and discoverability of results. This paper addresses these content-related and methodological challenges through a mapping review of reviews (Sutton et al., 2019), by exploring how (non)English-language primary studies have been synthesised in educational technology research. Search strings were developed in English, Spanish and German, and were used to search in the databases ERIC, Scopus, Web of Science, Dialnet, FIS Database and Google Scholar, yielding 7,275 items in the initial search. A sample of articles was drawn from the corpus, using methods for estimating sample size in the social sciences. 446 educational technology systematic reviews, published since 1983 in article, conference paper, chapter, or report form, in English, Spanish or German, were analysed using a pre-defined coding scheme. Among other aspects, the languages of publication of the primary studies and the reasons for or against the exclusion of certain languages were coded. The coding scheme can thus be used to demonstrate how existing systematic reviews deal with primary studies in different publication languages, and the extent to which bias exists with respect to consideration of English-language and peer-reviewed articles (e.g., Jackson & Kuriyama, 2019). Of the 446 systematic reviews, only 17% included studies in more than one language, and a further 42% did not provide any information about the language of inclusion (n=75). Multilingual searches were even less common, with only 8% of studies (n=35) searching for publications in more than one language, and only 7% (n=30) included articles with different languages. The findings of the review, including consideration of its own limitations (e.g., exclusion of reviews published in languages other than English, Spanish or German, choice of databases), are situated within the evolving methodological discussion of educational systematic reviews (e.g., Chong et al., 2023) and reflected against the larger context of educational publication structures (Beigel, 2021).

Beigel, F. (2021). A multi-scale perspective for assessing publishing circuits in non-hegemonic countries. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 4(1), 1845923. https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2020.1845923 Chong, S. W., Bond, M., & Chalmers, H. (2023). Opening the methodological black box of research synthesis in language education: where are we now and where are we heading? Applied Linguistics Review. https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2022-0193 Jackson, J. L., & Kuriyama, A. (2019). How often do systematic reviews exclude articles not published in English? Journal of General Internal Medicine, 34(8), 1388–1389. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-019-04976-x Marín, V. I., Buntins, K., Bedenlier, S., & Bond, M. (in press). Invisible borders in educational technology research? A comparative analysis. Educational Technology Research and Development. Sutton, A., Clowes, M., Preston, L., & Booth, A. (2019). Meeting the review family: Exploring review types and associated information retrieval requirements. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 36(3), 202–222. https://doi.org/10.1111/hir.12276 Zawacki-Richter, O., Kerres, M., Bedenlier, S., Bond, M., & Buntins, K. (Eds.). (2020). Systematic Reviews in Educational Research. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27602-7 Victoria I. Marín acknowledges the support of the Grant RYC2019-028398-I funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and FSE “El FSE invierte en tu futuro”.