31researchers in these countries need to be more proactive in sharing their views of
recent developments, analysing case studies using up-to-date research practices and
publishing their findings in English in international journals in the field.
Higher-education researchers in Asia need to be aware of the consequences of
the failure to engage with the international higher-education community. Several
scholars in Asia have already addressed this issue by identifying post-colonial
trends and asserting the place of Asian indigenous research in national and global
research communities (Xie and Yang 2015 ; Yang 2013 ). However, it is important to
be wary of movements that may become too radical and contradict the universal and
global characteristics of science (see Park 2016 for a critique of Chen 2010 ), as such
movements are likely to be detrimental rather than constructive. A lack of contribu-
tion to the international literature may also limit the visibility and influence of
important findings, which may then be misattributed to later scholars who obtain
similar results. The origin of such a misattribution would not lie in post-colonialism,
plagiarism or any other ideological or political practice, but simply in the failure to
make findings visible through publication in English and in the international litera-
ture. Research on science and technology policy provides a key example. The triple-
helix model conceptualised by Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leidesdorff in the late
1990s (Leidesdorff and Etzkowitz 1996 ) is now familiar to everyone in the science
and technology policy community; it has been widely used and has received hun-
dreds if not thousands of citations in the literature. Etzkowitz and Leidesdorff have
naturally been celebrated for developing the concept. However, in the early 1970s,
an Argentinian researcher named Jorge Sabato proposed a model known as the tri-
angle of Sabato, which is remarkably similar to the triple-helix model (Sabato
1975 ); the main difference is that the latter was conceptualised 20 years earlier. Why
has the triple-helix model received recognition worldwide, while hardly anyone
outside Latin America knows about the triangle of Sabato? The answer is simple:
Sabato wrote his findings in Spanish and contributed only to the Latin American
science and technology policy community, whereas Etzkowitz and Leidesdorff pub-
lished their findings in English and contributed to the global science and technology
policy community.
This example underlines the main objective of this chapter: to call on researchers
based in Asia to publish more research on their national higher-education systems
in the international literature. If these researchers continue to underperform in the
global arena while interest in higher education in Asia continues to grow, an increas-
ing number of researchers will come to Asia to research Asian higher-education
systems using their own social and cultural perspectives. Some of these analyses are
likely to yield biased findings, due to cultural and social differences between Asian
and other higher-education contexts that are not easily grasped, researchers’ limited
access to information or the use of pre-existing ‘Western’ theoretical frameworks
(usually derived from a global scientific hegemony established in the United States;
see Marginson 2008 ) to explain the phenomena under analysis.
I am not convinced that these researchers analysing Asian higher education should
be solely blamed for their potentially biased findings if they do not have Asian col-
leagues with whom to collaborate or lack access to previous findings published inter-
2 Higher-Education Researchers in Asia: The Risks of Insufficient Contribution...