Session Information
12 SES 07 A, Paper Session: AI and Collaboration at ECER
Paper Session
Contribution
The European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) is with more than 2.000 participants the central conference for Educational Sciences at the European level. Within the European Association of Educational Research (EERA) more than 40 national associations are organised and more than 30 various networks cluster the topics for the ECER.
Conferences in scholarship are seen as main enabler of intellectual exchange and socialisation within the disciplines, which legitimate as well new research fields (Gross & Fleming, 2011). Thereby, the conferences offer the platform for the global interaction of academic networks (Wagner, 2008).
However, the academic study of education derives from different national and cultural research traditions and, thus, from different disciplinary understandings and a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches (Keiner, 2006; Knaupp et al., 2014). The EERA's networks aim to provide a forum for this diversity, which is described in the expression and goal of the "European Educational Research Space" with its culturally specific intellectual and social practice among educational researchers (Lawn, 2002).
Studies of the ECER point out, that the participants have came mainly from a few countries with little presence in large parts of Europe. Participants from the UK in particular, as well as from Western and Northern Europe in general, dominated the conference, supplemented by higher participation numbers from the host countries (Kenk, 2003).
Keiner and Hofbauer (2014) verify this and state that participation in subsequent years was unevenly weighted, but also pointing to the multinationality of participants, which is not reflected in high numbers. While the collaboration is increasingly observed in the sense of co-authorships in publication practice (Aman & Botte, 2017), the transnational collaboration at educational conferences is so far unclear.
This paper explores the participation at the ECER conferences and the collaboration at the submissions in relation to the country of the affiliation. Thereby, it describes the development of the ECER submissions at the conferences from 1998 to 2019, which allow to observe longer-term trends. Addionally, the submissions are analysed on a bigger regional picture by regional and continental assignment. The so-called "host country phenomenon" (Kenk, 2003, p. 618) is considered and examined for longer-term mobilisation effects in the following years and preferred international collaboration patterns are analyzed.
Method
The data analysis leans on bibliometric approaches and remains descriptive (see in this context, e.g. Aman & Botte, 2017). The research corpus bases on a provided datadump from EERA encompassing abstracts and metadata from 1998 to 2019 similar to the homepage’s programme search (https://eera-ecer.de/ecer-programmes/). Approximately 39,000 submissions with about 87,000 names are included, whereby this is a multiple of the actual number of persons due to new entries each year and the various functions (submitting, presenting, other authors). The limitation of this datadump is, that the submitting authors alone provide the full information of the submission including the co-authors, which is why the naming and affiliations are highly inconsistent. The fact that it is not immediately possible to merge the names, which are often spelled differently, limits the data set with regard to further analyses, such as co-authorship networks. To assign to the affiliations of the research the explicit country a semi autmatic approach is conducted. On the basis of the freely available software OpenRefine the country information is explicated from affiliations. Additionally, an automatic comparison of the affiliation with Wikidata (Reconciliation Service; Delpeuch, 2019) searched for entities such as countries, cities and universities, depending on the comprehensiveness of the information. The suggested entities were manually proofed and accepted. The extracted countries should be understood as the countries in which the person’s affiliation is located rather than as home nations. In the case of occasional double mentions of institutions and countries, we gave preference to the former. Using this method, 96% of the affiliations have been assigned to a country. Furtheron, the countries are classified based on the EuroVoc standard to identify shifts between larger geographical entities on the long run (EuroVoc, 2023). The paper considers co-authorship as research collaboration also due to the formal restriction of co-authorships in the submission of papers, even though this connection has been questioned on various occasions (Katz & Martin, 1997; Laudel, 2002; Ponomariov & Boardman, 2016).
Expected Outcomes
Drawing on some main results the analyses show a steady increase in presentations from around 500 in 1998 to five times that by 2019. From a country-specific perspective, there are particularly many participants from the host country. Overall, there has been an increase in the number of participants from almost all regions since the 2008 conference. From the beginning, Western European countries have been the most strongly represented and will continue to be by far the most participants until 2019. These are followed by the Northern and Southern European countries, while a medium increase can be seen in the Central and Eastern European countries and countries from Asia, Oceania and North America. Africa and South America are represented by only a few participants. Collaboratively produced submissions have outweighed single-authored submissions since around 2009, in line with the findings of Keiner and Hofbauer (2014). The trend towards multi-authorships continues. Similarly, international collaboration through jointly authored submissions has increased significantly from a few in 1998, so that at the end of the period almost one fifth of all contributions originate from an international collaboration. The most frequent collaborations over the years have been between the UK and other countries with many participants (Spain, Germany, Sweden, Australia) and between neighbouring countries (in Scandinavia and German-speaking countries). All in all the paper contributes to a further development of an ongoing monitoring of Educational Research in Europe enabling the research community to engage critically in designing the "European Educational Research Space“.
References
Aman, V. & Botte, A. (2017). A bibliometric view on the internationalization of European educational research. European Educational Research Journal, 16(6), 843–868. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904117729903 Delpeuch, A. (2019). A survey of OpenRefine reconciliation services, https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08092 EuroVoc (2023). 7206 Europe: Concept Scheme". EuroVoc. Publications Office of the EU. https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/concept-scheme/-/resource?uri=http://eurovoc.europa.eu/100277 Katz, J. & Martin, B. R. (1997). What is research collaboration? Research Policy, 26(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0048-7333(96)00917-1 Keiner, E. (2010). Disciplines of education. The value of disciplinary self-observation. In: Furlong, J. & Lawn, M. (eds.): Disciplines of education. Their Role in the Future of Education Research. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 159-172. Keiner, E. & Hofbauer, S. (2014). EERA and its European Conferences on Educational Research: A Patchwork of Research on European Educational Research. European Educational Research Journal, 13(4), 504–518. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2014.13.4.504 Kenk, M. (2003). ECER's Space in Europe: In between Science, Research and Politics? A Research Report. European Educational Research Journal, 2(4), 614–627. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2003.2.4.9 Knaupp, M., Schaufler, S., Hofbauer, S. & Keiner, E. (2014). Education research and educational psychology in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom – an analysis of scholarly journals. Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Bildungswissenschaften, 36(1), 83–108. https://doi.org/10.25656/01:10791 Laudel, G. (2002). What do we measure by co-authorships? Research Evaluation, 11(1), 3–15. https://doi.org/10.3152/147154402781776961 Lawn, M. (2002). Welcome to the First Issue. European Educational Research Journal, 1(1), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2002.1.1.1 Ponomariov, B. & Boardman, C. (2016). What is co-authorship? Scientometrics, 109(3), 1939–1963. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2127-7 Wagner, C. S. (2008). The new invisible college: Science for development. Brookings Institution Press.
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