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world have of national higher education research communities in Asia is limited.
This is not surprising, as even in continents that have developed, stable and thriving
higher education, research communities with a long history of international partici-
pation and engagement work as ‘silos’ with much less interaction and knowledge
exchange of ideas than would be anticipated (Tight 2014 ). If an international higher
education research community is to grow and develop, it is critical not only that
researchers from all over the world participate in it (currently, mainly higher educa-
tion researchers from North America, Europe and Oceania participate; see Jung and
Horta 2015 ) but also that there is some knowledge of national higher education
communities, their challenges, their history and development and their prospects for
the future.
The aim of this book was to explore the evolution of higher education research
in Asia from a comparative perspective. It is important to compare nations when
investigating higher education research due to differences between countries in the
number of active, productive and skilled researchers (among other issues; see
Teichler 2014 ) but also to understand the importance placed on international journal
publications in English and the influence of institutional and governmental priori-
ties on research (Atkinson 2013 ; Slaughter 2001 ). The crucial issue is to balance the
view of the higher education research communities between their national evolu-
tion, the organisation that they have, who constitutes them and how they are provid-
ing new knowledge to local and national universities, students and other stakeholders,
including policy implications for developing and improving policies and their con-
tribution and visibility to the international community. This balance relates, to a
large extent, to issues of training, learning and formation that allow higher educa-
tion researchers to have the flexibility and ability (or lack thereof) of the domain of
language (publishing in English internationally and in the national language(s)
nationally), of writing styles and research standards – because developing research
and writing to a national journal is not the same as writing for an international jour-
nal – and of scope and impact, as the topics that are of key relevance for national
audiences may require an approach, focus and level of depth that may not be appro-
priate for an international audience (which the editors of the international journals
will be quick on pointing out).
The book demonstrates the rapid evolution of higher education research in most
Asian countries, particularly in East Asia, in terms of both the number of research-
ers and publications and the diversity of research themes and methodologies.
However, higher education research in some countries in Asia is comparatively
underdeveloped, underlying an inequality in terms of development of higher educa-
tion research communities. This seems to be related to the stage of development of
the higher education systems themselves as well as to traditional thinking about the
organisation of fields of knowledge and science. Indeed, higher education research
has no fixed identity or conceptualisation in some Asian countries; and even when
the importance of the field is acknowledged, sufficient resources and support may
not be available. (This relates to the irony identified by Dennison in 1992, that
J. Jung et al.