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Growth or steady state? A bibliometric focus on international comparative higher education research

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Abstract

The study combines a bibliometric approach with a content analysis of abstracts of articles to explore the patterns of international comparative higher education research in leading international journals. The overall data set covers 4,095 publications from the Web of Science for the period 1992–2012 and the amount of international comparative articles in this data set is analyzed utilizing a geographical coding. Contrary to a general proliferation of international and global trends in higher education, the results of the analysis most importantly reveal a relatively steady state of international comparative higher education research over the past 20 years. Further patterns examined show that international collaborative articles have a much higher share in international comparative research compared to non-comparative research, small-scale country clusters are preferred for comparison and there is a dense network of comparative clusters between Europe and the US. Finally, rationales for these patterns are discussed, as well as potential implications.

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Notes

  1. We have to note a potential limitation of our approach at this point: one could assume that there is research that just states in the abstract that it is international comparative without mentioning the countries that have been studied. As a matter of course, we have double-checked the occurrence of articles in our database explicitly labeling themselves as comparative research in their abstracts. Most of them are indeed not international comparative research. We found 848 articles in our overall database reaching from the 1980s up to 2012 that make use of the term comparative, but 735 are articles that compare issues in higher education within one country or mostly theoretical articles. 96 percent of the remaining articles were detected by our geo-coding, which affirms our strategy of a geographical coding and our approach in general.

  2. The results might also indicate that the choice of countries that are compared in higher education research is influenced by exogenous factors and opportunity structures (e.g. funding, established collaborations), and, furthermore, endogenous factors as speech communities (e.g. the US and Great Britain or Mexico and Spain) seem to have a certain influence on comparative clusters of countries. But to prove this, an integration of further data sources to the network analysis would be necessary.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Michael Borggräfe for his assistance on the data coding, Stefan Pump for his help with the setup of the database, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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  1. International Centre for Higher Education Research (INCHER-Kassel), University of Kassel, Moenchebergstr. 17, 34109, Kassel, Germany

    Anna Kosmützky & Georg Krücken

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  1. Anna Kosmützky
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Correspondence to Anna Kosmützky or Georg Krücken.

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Kosmützky, A., Krücken, G. Growth or steady state? A bibliometric focus on international comparative higher education research. High Educ 67, 457–472 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-013-9694-9

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