Higher education research in Hong Kong, Japan, China, and Malaysia: Exploring research community cohesion and the integration of thematic approaches

Higher education research in Hong Kong, Japan, China, and Malaysia: Exploring research community cohesion and the integration of thematic approaches

• Kim, Y. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
• Horta, H. The University of Hong Kong
• Jung, J. The University of Hong Kong

Studies in Higher Education, 1-20, 2015

Routledge

2015

• T Educational Research
  • TD Libraries, Sources of Information, Educational Research Institutes

• Hong Kong
• Japan
• China
• Malaysia

• 1997.7 onwards

• Post-Secondary Education

This article analyzes higher education research published in international higher education journals by researchers from China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Malaysia from 1980 to 2013. It does so based on publication counts, and co-authorship and cross-citation mapping, examining these countries' publication patterns in terms of thematic approach and community cohesion. The results show that each country has experienced distinct evolutions of higher education research, both in terms of the number of publications and thematic diversity. The research organization analyzed by co-authorship networks shows that higher education researchers in Hong Kong tend more to integrate two higher education research approaches -- teaching and learning, and policy studies -- into their research work. It is also in Hong Kong where most higher education researchers focus their research on both teaching and learning, and policy topics. Higher education researchers in China, Japan, and Malaysia are more thematically specialized in terms of both their positioning and their co-authorship preference. These findings suggest that a broader integration of different thematic areas may be linked more to path-dependent and contextual characteristics than to differences related to the development stage of higher education systems. This is confirmed by the cross-citation analysis, which shows that higher education researchers based in Hong Kong tend to cite each other more frequently than do those based in Japan, China, and Malaysia, suggesting a much greater community cohesion in Hong Kong than in these other countries. The findings highlight that while the maturity of a higher education system influences community cohesion, other factors influence thematic leaning and integration.
[Copyright of Studies in Higher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1036850]

• English

Journal Articles

• 03075079

• 10.1080/03075079.2015.1036850

https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/bibs/930273fa

2015-10-16