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the world in their contribution to the global pool of knowledge in the field of higher
education. This underperformance is evident from analysis of the volume of publi-
cations contributed by Asian researchers to the international higher-education litera-
ture relative to population size and number of students in Asia and from comparison
of this indicator with the world average number of publications in higher education
relative to global population and total number of students worldwide. The analysis
reported in this book chapter also reveals that the Asian higher-education research
community is becoming more and more internationally oriented and relies increas-
ingly on a new generation of researchers. However, this positive trend has several
limitations. The first is the tremendous reliance of Asian-affiliated researchers on
scholars from countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia
to collaboratively produce contributions to the field. This collaboration should by no
means be devalued or obstructed; in modern globalised research systems, collabora-
tion has become the praxis of research activities in most fields and is crucial to
attempts to solve the increasingly complex and uncertain challenges facing human
societies all over the globe (Ebadi and Schiffauerova 2015 ). But it is important to
increase collaboration between higher-education researchers in the Asian region,
which continues to be scarce, revealing a somewhat disconnected and unarticulated
community of researchers that contributes little to the international higher- education
community (this besides the limited collaboration between those higher-education
researchers involved in teaching and learning and those working on the policy
dimensions of higher-education research; see Kim et al. 2017 ; Horta and Jung 2014 ).
In recent years, there have been attempts to tackle the problem of limited col-
laboration between Asia-affiliated researchers in the field of higher education. The
creation of the Higher Education Research Association (HERA) (whose name
excludes geographical particularity and thus reflects an internationalist stance simi-
lar to that of Europe’s Consortium of Higher Education Researchers, CHER) and its
ongoing conferences indicate a growing willingness to bring together higher-
education researchers from Asia, starting with researchers based in East Asia.^5 The
HERA conferences occur annually and move from country to country, probably in
emulation of the CHER model. This is promising, because the attempt made by
CHER’s instigators to promote a linked, relatively coherent and thriving higher-
education research community with an international outlook in Europe has largely
been successful (Teichler 2013 ). Routine events such as annual conferences help to
consolidate higher-education research communities and furnish them with common
identities, enabling them to make a unified contribution to the field (Francis 2014 ;
Kehm 2013 ). Other national conferences are taking place in Asia to promote a more
international perspective and underline the need to contribute to international
knowledge in the field, providing a forum for debate on national and institutional
experiences, challenges and initiatives from which others can learn. For example,
during the 2016 annual meeting of the Japan Association for Higher Education
Research, a session in English with non-Japanese guests was held for the very first
(^5) The fourth and most recent HERA conference took place in Hong Kong in May 2016: https://
http://www.ln.edu.hk/dgs/events/HERA-conference-programme.pdf [accessed 29 September 2016].
H. Horta