20
a common scientometric counting method whereby articles with multiple authors
are counted by author affiliation (Gauffriau et al. 2008 ). For example, an article with
two authors affiliated with different countries was counted as two articles. The main
focus of the analysis was articles authored or co-authored by researchers based in
Asia. These data were analysed by quinquennia to assess the evolution of produc-
tion in the field of higher education at the country level. Author analysis was also
pursued to identify the researchers in the region who have produced the greatest
volume of international publications on higher education.
Results
Evolution of Higher-Education Research Worldwide and in Asia
The number of articles published in higher-education journals worldwide is increas-
ing. As Fig. 2.1 shows, the number of articles published between 1980–1984 and
2011–2015 increased by 4.4 times, from 1301 to 5738, respectively. This growth
reflects the increasing contribution of national higher-education research communi-
ties to the international knowledge pool – even from communities with a long his-
tory of participation in global science research (Lo and Ng 2015 ). Some of these
international publications were also comparative studies, which have maintained a
steady state throughout the last decades as identified by Kosmutzky and Krucken
( 2014 ). However, the rise in the number of articles is also due to the emergence of
new journals in higher education and the increase in annual volumes and issues of
existing higher-education journals to accommodate the increasing participation and
contribution of researchers from outside the United States (Tight 2012 ).
This growth was not linear, but followed a polynomial trend line with two main
periods. First, from 1980 to the mid-2000s, article number remained fairly steady,
fluctuating only within a narrow range (from 1211 publications in each of two peri-
ods, 1983–1977 and 1985–1989, to 1486 in 2001–2005). Between 2001 and 2005,
only 9% more articles were published than between 1980 and 1984. In the second
main period, from the mid-2000s to the present day, the increase in the number of
publications accelerated, accounting for most of the spectacular growth recently
observed in publications on higher education. This period of growth coincided with
the transformation of the higher-education systems of upper middle income coun-
tries from elite to mass systems (Marginson 2016 ) and with increasing national and
institutional policy pressure on researchers from all disciplines to publish more fre-
quently in international indexed journals, especially high-impact journals (Dobele
and Rundle-Theile 2015 ; West and Rich 2012 ). This pressure was due in part to the
craze for world university rankings and institutional positioning and legitimisation
activities in global higher-education systems, and in part to the rise of an evaluative
culture and accompanying assessment systems in higher education, associated with
managerial practices that have influenced academia (Leisyte and Wilkesmann 2016 ;
Cattaneo et al. 2016 ). As interest in higher education mounts, and its challenges – old
H. Horta