Abstract
An “economy of publications and citations” has emerged in academia, where databases as Web of Science and Scopus provide tools for “quality” measurements. The assumption is that such measurements are unbiased in terms of geography, language, gender etc. This is investigated by scrutinizing the “invisible colleges”, i.e. networks of citations in adult learning/education journals, indexed by Scopus. A bibliometric analysis is made of 151,261 direct citation links in 5 journals published between 2006–2014. The outcome shows a pattern of biases: a US/UK, anglophone, male domination. It also shows how the investigated field consists of many loosely connected invisible colleges. This might make the field weak in terms of academic power.
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The political backdrop to these developments was the new way of governing the public sector with “quality indicators” – often referred to in the literature as an integral part of “New Public Management” – where, simply put, a business perspective is expanded to all sectors of society, including higher education (Elzinga 2010).
- 3.
See, for instance, the so-called “Shanghai list” that in part builds on performance indicators of WoS. If the list has global ambitions, WoS, in many scientific areas, has very limited reach (Liedman http://www.confero.ep.liu.se/issues/2013/v1/i1/121015/confero13v1i1a1.pdf; Gingras 2016).
- 4.
One might assume that the growing phenomenon of open access that is now gaining momentum will lessen the exclusion of universities and researchers in poor countries from accessing and contributing to the knowledge production in the global north. However, we are yet to see if this is materialising or merely a wishful hypothesis.
- 5.
Elsevier’s bibliometric database Scopus is arguably the second most influential database after WoS (Archambault et al. 2006, 2009). Since articles in adult education, on the whole, will end up in journals classified as education or educational research, empirical data on WoS-indexed journals and how citations are distributed by country are of significance for this issue (see Larsson 2010; Fejes and Nylander 2014; Chaps. 4 and 6 of this book). Almost all journals in the field of education and educational research, which is indexed in WoS, are British or North American.
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The reason for not selecting journals indexed in WoS is that only a very few journals in the adult learning field were indexed there at the time of our enquiry.
- 7.
Other journals such as Vocations and Learning, or the European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults (RELA), were not part of our sample because they had not been indexed in Scopus for long enough to make a full-scale bibliometric analysis meaningful.
- 8.
This journal publishes articles which concern adults’ learning as well as the learning of young people in the regular school system. Since the journal is an important publication outlet for adult learning scholars interested in relationships between education and work, it was included in our sample even though it has a slightly wider scope.
- 9.
Document types other than articles or reviews often do not include reference lists in Scopus and were therefore excluded.
- 10.
Editorial membership was gathered by contacting the editorial boards of each journal. All editors up until 2014 were registered. However, editors of journals outside the sample period were not taken into consideration.
- 11.
While the author column was quite easily isolated, the reference column often contained both author and editor names which required further identification procedures. After running the script, a manual extraction of author names from the reference column was carried out. Also, note that Scopus includes a maximum of eight authors per reference – the seven first ones and the last. In the field of adult education and learning this is not a serious limitation as very few publications contain more than eight authors.
- 12.
The names of organisations and government authorities were ignored since the focus of this study is on individual authors, traditions and field positions. Furthermore, all variants of citing and cited author names were gathered for a manual cleaning process. Of the 33 932 names, 862 name variants were identified and corrected among the most frequently occurring names. These corrections were replaced in the direct citation links. All author subjects with more than ten citations and the 100 most cited authors were double checked by two researchers independently.
- 13.
However, male scholars who identify with the field (i.e. not the “gurus” from outside the field) might also need to publish a lot within the field in order to attract scholarly recognition. This is especially the case for scholars from non-Anglophone countries.
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For example, see special issue RWL9, “Work, learning and globalisation: challenges for the twenty-first century”. Guest editors: Helen Bound, Yew-Jin Lee and Wei-Ying Lim (Volume 29, Issue 7/8).
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From our own contacts, we know that a lot of research is published in e.g. Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese and German. One can thus suspect that there is much to be missed when research does not pay attention to international research to the extent we have shown to be the case in the field of adult education and learning. For this to change, however, it is not simply sufficient to get publishers, editors and reviewers interested in this work; one would also have to train researchers to read and acknowledge work across current borders.
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Anderson-Levitt (2011) points out in a review of ethnographic education research on a global scale how different discourses are elaborated outside Anglophone academia. These excluded books and journals may elaborate other discourses and other problems, and focus on other study objects.
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Another study of peer reviewing in the Swedish Medical Research Council concluded that peer reviewing was discriminating against women applicants in a study, which could rule out a number of alternative hypothesis: for a female applicant to receive a grant they had to produce three extra papers in Nature or Science and be 2.5 times more productive than the average male applicant (Wennerås and Wold 1997, p. 342). The conclusion was that discrimination lay behind the outcomes.
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However, we can see how two Australian scholars who are editors of journals in the field, David Boud and Stephen Billett, are relatively central figures in several of the journals under scrutiny. Such a position most likely connects to Australian scholars having a “brokering function” in the field of adult education and learning research, mediating between scholars in different countries as well as between different camps within the field (see Nylander et al. 2018, and Chap. 4 in this book).
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Larsson, S., Fejes, A., Österlund, L., Nylander, E. (2019). Invisible Colleges in Research on Adult Learning: A Bibliometric Study on International Scholarly Recognition. In: Fejes, A., Nylander, E. (eds) Mapping out the Research Field of Adult Education and Learning. Lifelong Learning Book Series, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10946-2_5
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