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current state of and future directions for higher education in Asia were authored by
Australian researchers is indicative of the global prevalence of non-Asian research-
ers in the field of Asian higher education.^1 This raises concerns that Asia-based
researchers are under-represented in the higher-education literature; according to
some authors, this may be due to editorial bias (e.g. Atkinson 2013 ). Meanwhile, the
‘Westernisation’ of theories and methods and their consequent inapplicability to
Asian contexts creates tension and discomfort among Asia-based researchers (Lo
2016a, b), while they continue to struggle to define Asia-appropriate models, theo-
ries and methods that are visible to both national and international actors and repre-
sent best practice in analysing ongoing developments in Asian higher-education
systems (Yang 2015 ; Postiglione 2014 ).
Against this backdrop, the current chapter builds on and extends the work of
Jung and Horta ( 2015 ) on the contribution of Asian countries to internationally pub-
lished higher-education research. Its aim is to better understand how this contribu-
tion has evolved and to what extent researchers in the Asian region are capable of
contributing more than they have done so far. To achieve this aim, descriptive statis-
tics drawn from a dataset of indexed international journals are analysed using a
quantitative historical method (e.g. White and McCain 1998 ) to (1) assess the evolu-
tion of publications in Asia and elsewhere in the world, (2) analyse co-authorship
collaboration at country level and (3) identify and better understand generational
changes in composition of Asia-based higher-education researchers with the great-
est volume of international publications.
This chapter is organised as follows. In the next section, the data used and the
chosen methodological approach are described. Subsequently, the results are dis-
cussed in relation to previous literature on higher-education research and the trans-
formation of higher-education systems in Asia. The final section concludes the
study: the findings are discussed with reference to the current engagement in inter-
national publication of Asia-based higher-education researchers, and some conse-
quences of the failure to encourage higher-education researchers to publish in
international higher-education journals are suggested.
Methods
Database and Analysis
This study is based on the Scopus database, a large abstract and citation database of
peer-reviewed research literature, which is particularly suited to the analysis of pub-
lications produced in international peer-reviewed higher-education journals due to
(^1) The most frequently cited article with the keyword ‘Asia’ in the international higher education
literature (cited 118 times) was published in 2008 in Higher Education Policy and co-authored by
two English researchers and one Asia-based researcher (Deem et al. 2008 ). The second most fre-
quently cited article with this keyword was authored by Simon Marginson, as noted in the text.
H. Horta