The purpose is to describe and analyse research publications to capture nodes and nets in conversations that are part in organizing the European Educational Research Area. After a broad mapping of research publications, the focus is on analysing articles in the European Educational Research Journal. EERJ has Europeanization of educational research as – collaboration and sharing thoughts – been a main theme for over 20 years (Lawn, 2002; 2009). Given this, which research fronts and intellectual traditions are at work in the EERJ publications and how are these publications organising themselves in nodes and nets? Answers to such questions are vital in order to understand different tendencies in European Educational research and as a basis for international research cooperation.

This research is based on analyses of the interplay between intellectual traditions and the societal structuring of research (c.f. Whitley, 2000) and actor—network theory (Callon et al, 1991) and an understanding of research referencing as ways of organising research fields (Czarniawska, 2022). A combination of bibliometric (Garfield, 1979) and interpretative analyses are used in empirical analyses of e.g. teacher education (Lindblad et al, 2023) and international comparisons of research organizing (Gross et al, in print) in terms of links between publications in the making of research networks.

First a broad overview: By means of Harzing’s Publish or Perish (Harzing.com) search engine we identified (2024-01-15) almost one thousand EERJ papers published 2002-2023 who in sum were cited more than 38 000 times.

Then, we turned to Web of Science (https://webofscience.help.clarivate.com/en-us) for more specific information about the EERJ publications 2017-2023. Analyses of links between publications are carried out by means of VosViewer (Van Eck & Waltman, 2000) in order to understand how these publications are organised by, and organising, this research field. EERJ is included in WoS since 2017 and so far 350 publications are part of the WoS database. Explorative analyses identified different networks with central nodes in terms of research fronts as well as intellectual traditions.

Cooperation in research over geopolitical contexts was also identified and discussed in relation to matters of Europeanization and research communication. Intellectual traditions were structured in different dimensions – referring to for instance from cultural sociology to actor-network theory, and from curriculum theory to systems theory.

The study is based on bibliometric resources and different ways of relating publications to each other (Garfield, 1979). Data sources were obtained by Web of Science. At the WoS there were (Jan 15, 2024) identified 278703 publications categorised as educational research presented in 946 sources such as scientific journals. The development of this research field is described over national affiliations of researchers and over time. The EERJ was included in the WoS in 2017 which contains 350 articles with 10830 cited sources. Data from WoS were transformed into text-files and further analysed in VosViewer where links between publications are in focus for cluster analysis to explore how the EERJ publications are organized by and organising educational research. Intellectual traditions are identified by co-citation of different references and research fronts by bibliographic coupling between publications. How the research is organized over space is analysed by clustering intellectual traditions and research fronts over countries and regions. A selection of central nodes is subject to narrative analyses of texts in order to understand the dynamics of referencing in the making of recognized contributions in the EERJ field of study,

As expected by previous studies the overall educational research field is in Web of Science dominated by Anglo-Saxon research in terms of research affiliation, publication sources, and language. However, the EERJ differs to this with larger shares of publications outside the Anglo-Saxon context and in terms of cooperation in publishing activities. A set of eight research front networks are identified and presented by the explorative analyses in two dimensions. These are interpreted by induction as follows with central nodes in the networks as follows: - One from studies of internationalization and globalisation (for instance Dobbins & Kwiek, 2017) to matters of education and Bildung (Smeyers, 2019) as examples of distant networks and nodes) - One from studies of higher education (Cotton et al, 2017) to analyses of communication systems. (Vanderstraetern, 2021) These two dimensions and their four networks are structuring the field of research fronts. The other four networks are operating in the space given by these structuring dimensions. The cluster analyses of intellectual traditions did also result in eight clusters in two dimensions, but structured in three different ways: - One from organization theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977) to curriculum theory and didactics (Klafki, 1985) To this vertical dimension is added two horizontal slopes with different directions: - One from cultural sociology (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) to history (Lawn, 2012) and actor-network theory (Latour, 2007) - One from sociology of education (Bernstein, 2000) to systems theory (Luhmann & Schorr, 2002) By means of these analyses we see how this research is organising itself in different kinds of intellectual traditions. A general conclusion is that the EERJ is in practice moving towards Europeanization of educational research in terms of recognition of and cooperation in research. Implications of this in terms of research conversations over world regions are discussed.

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