21and emergent – draw the attention of mature higher-education researchers and others
that contribute to the pool of knowledge on higher education (Kehm 2015 ), it will be
interesting to see whether the increase in publications on higher education will con-
tinue or stabilise in the near future. Interest in higher-education issues, coupled with
the ‘publish or perish’ imperative and other collaborative-competitive trends associ-
ated with pressurised audit cultures, evaluation systems and prestige rankings, sug-
gests that the second key trend depicted in Fig. 2.1 will last for several more years.
Researchers from different regions make different contributions to the field of
higher education (Fig. 2.2). There are two main reasons for this inequality. First,
almost all of the specialised higher-education literature is published in English,
favouring researchers in native English-speaking countries and countries in which
resources are available to allow authors to commission their articles to be proofread
by native English speakers (Min 2014 ). Second, compared with those in Asia,
higher-education systems developed earlier in North America, followed by Europe,
in which the international collaboration of national communities was internation-
ally supported by the European Framework programmes (Hoekman et al. 2013 ).
This created demand for a higher-education research community that would support
policymakers, the academic community and other stakeholders by gaining insights
into the emerging and sometimes unexpected challenges facing higher-education
massification (Kuzhabekova et al. 2015 ).
Therefore, it is not surprising to observe in Fig. 2.2 that researchers affiliated
with North and Central America^3 contributed the most to the higher-education field
(^3) A large percentage of the articles published in the North and Central America regions were
authored or co-authored by US and Canada-affiliated researchers.
0
1.00 0
2.00 0
3.00 0
4.00 0
5.00 0
6.000
Fig. 2.1 Number of publications in specialised higher-education literature worldwide,
1980–2015
2 Higher-Education Researchers in Asia: The Risks of Insufficient Contribution...