Researching Higher Education in Asia History, Development and Future

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the second period. There are several possible reasons for the limited contribution of
South American higher-education researchers; most importantly, they tend to dis-
seminate their findings predominantly in Spanish and Portuguese language journals
that are not indexed by an English language-dominated international community
and thus lack widespread visibility (see Vasconcelos et al. 2009 ).
Figure 2.3 shows that the worldwide share of international higher-education
articles produced by Asia-affiliated researchers increased from 2% to 4% in the
1980s and 1990s, respectively, from 5% to 6% in the first decade of the 2000s and
to 8% after 2010. Although this is a positive trend, it also indicates that Asian-based
researchers have the potential to make a greater contribution to the field of higher-
education research and that knowledge production in this field is currently occur-
ring at a very low rate. This is confirmed by the following two observations. Between
1981 and 1985, Asian researchers in the field of higher education published 0.002
articles per million people in Asia. This figure increased to 0.003 between 1991 and
1995, 0.005 between 2001 and 2005 and 0.023 between 2011 and 2015, but remains
far from the world average, which serves as a reference point for world production
relative to the global population. Between 1981 and 1985, 0.055 articles per million
people worldwide were published in the field of higher education. This figure
remained roughly stable in 1991–1995 (0.053), decreased in 2001–2005 to 0.047
(partly due to the rapid increase in the world population during this period) and has
recently reached 0.160. This trend indicates that the contribution of new knowledge
to the international higher-education literature by Asian researchers relative to the
population of Asia is significantly smaller than the equivalent contribution of
researchers elsewhere in the world. Similar findings are obtained from the analysis

0%

1%

2%

3%

4%

5%

6%

7%

8%

9%

0

1.00 0

2.00 0

3.00 0

4.00 0

5.00 0

6.00 0

7.00 0

World Asia as a percent of the world

Fig. 2.3 Publications in the specialised higher-education literature worldwide and share of Asia-
affiliated publications, 1980–2015

2 Higher-Education Researchers in Asia: The Risks of Insufficient Contribution...