Prospering in higher education research relates to where articles appear – and where authors live  

Marek Kwiek (Uni Posnan) considered 6344 articles between 1996-2018 that appeared in elite journals, Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, Higher Education Research and Development, Journal of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, and Review of Higher Education, in the context of 21000 papers in 41 mastheads.

Overall, Anglosphere authors are in a “hegemonic position” which he suggests, raises key questions, “whether these trends reflect editors’ and reviewers’ policies or an aggregation of authors’ decisions about where to send their manuscripts.”

Editors certainly like Australian-based researchers – they account for 19 per cent of articles published in the six, behind the US (30 per cent), ahead of the UK (13 per cent) and way in front of the last of the top five, Canada and The Netherlands (both 3 per cent).

This might be due in some part to one of the six, HERD being Australian based.

However, CMM has no idea what researchers from Aus universities publish about across the set. If their subjects address local issues or use local examples, it will make a change from other HASS disciplines, where researchers worry international journals are not interested in Australia.