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and to position and allocate resources accordingly (e.g. Boyd and Smith 2016 ;
Smith et al. 2014 ). It is not always easy to find such a balance. Research- funding
agencies play a key role in the relative production of nationally and internationally
oriented research (Drivas et al. 2015 ), but the limited number of international pub-
lications by researchers in many countries in Asia suggests an orientation towards
national publications to the detriment of publishing in international journals (as in
South Korea; see Jung 2015 ).
However, if few or no locally based researchers write about higher education in
their own countries and publish these case studies in the English language interna-
tional literature, higher education in Asia will ultimately be addressed only by
researchers based elsewhere and written based on their own culturally informed
perspectives. Crucially, English is the lingua franca of research today; articles not
published in English are unlikely to be read widely. Publications in Japanese,
Chinese and other languages used in the Asian region are generally read only by
those who know these languages. The problem is a lack of global visibility, which
is of major importance, because any story told on a global scale – by non-nationally
based or nationally based researchers – will resonate and remain in the minds of
audiences worldwide, thereby becoming the ‘truth’. Some scholars raise concerns
about intellectual imperialism when researchers based elsewhere tell the stories of
other countries in ways subsequently criticised (often legitimately; see Alatas 2000 )
for bias. However, the appropriation of these stories by researchers based elsewhere
may also be due to a lack of local narratives in the international literature and thus a
gap in global understanding of the issues addressed.
However, the point here is not whether research written by researchers based
elsewhere is biased (and there are many cases of such researchers with tremendous
in-depth knowledge of other countries; e.g. Hayhoe 2015 ).^6 The key problem is that
research produced by researchers based elsewhere may receive global acceptance if
locally based researchers do not publish their own accounts of events in their respec-
tive countries in the international literature. It is natural to assume that the only
available information on a topic – even if limited to a few articles or affected by
bias – is a valid account of that topic. Note that culturally or socially biased articles
written about a higher-education system by non-Asian affiliated researchers have a
fair chance of being accepted by international journals if the panel reviewers are
researchers who know little about the country’s higher-education system or society.
The application of theories and methods with which reviewers are familiar, rather
than the content of the articles, will be the decisive factor in their assessment of
research quality. The key question I am asking is as follows: are researchers based
in Asia content to allow only other researchers to report on and discuss the progress
of higher education in their own region and countries? If not, higher-education
(^6) Note that terms used throughout the text are “Asia-based researchers” or “Asia-affiliated research-
ers” which focus on affiliation and not on nationality. By this, I underline that nationality is not
necessarily a precondition to better understand a country. There may be foreign researchers living
in a country that may understand some phenomena in that country better than most nationals from
that country.
H. Horta