Mapping a landscape in-motion: Using bibliometrics to examine the changing field of Comparative and International Development Education

• In Event: Exploring international and comparative education through bibliometric analysis: Mapping out what we know to reevaluate purposes

Proposal

Background:

The field of Comparative and International Education (CIE) has a well-developed history of studies which utilize data from published journal articles to map the scope and scale of the field. However, these studies rely mainly on academic literature, with a strong focus on academic journals as the central unit of analysis - an approach which has been recognized as providing a limited perspective. To provide a more complete map of the field, this study contributes new evidence as to what individuals and organizations are producing and disseminating knowledge to shape the global education agenda; how they are interacting with each other through knowledge networks; and how these networks have changed over a 13-year period of the Education for All (EFA) initiative. Specifically, this study examines patterns and trends of knowledge production and dissemination through and examination of the evidence-base informing one of the most influential publications in the field of international education development, the Education for All Global Monitoring Reports (EFA GMRs) and illuminates broader discussions in the literature as to what knowledge counts and who gets to decide?

Data Sources and Methods:

Through the application of bibliometric methods, this study examines the combined 8271 references listed in the 12 EFA GMRs published between 2002-2015 to gain empirical insight into (a) individual and organizational knowledge actors engaged in the production and dissemination of the evidence referenced, (b) the knowledge networks, or underlying patterns of relationships between actors and organizations, (c) the extent of the influence wielded by individual and organizational actors over the knowledge network, and (d) how the EFA GMR knowledge networks changed over time. Additional data were collected from publicly accessible online sources including author CVs, biographies, and personal websites, organizational websites to supplement analysis.
In addition to a range of descriptive statistics, this study calculated for Lotka’s Law of authorship distribution and Bradford’s law of publisher distribution and utilized citation network analysis to provide a deeper look at the EFA GMR knowledge networks.

Findings and Significance:

In total, this study found the EFA GMRs reference 6833 unique authors, including 6239 individual authors (91.31%), and 594 organizational authors (8.69%). On average, each author is referenced 2.05 times within the dataset, however organizational authors tend to be disproportionately referenced. Several organizations were found to be far more central to the EFA GMR knowledge networks than others, with the most central being the World Bank, UNESCO and the EFA GMR. Despite the prominence of these organizations, this study found the EFA GMR knowledge networks grew significantly over time. However, despite this growth, network density and fragmentation measures conclude these networks are not becoming increasingly interconnected.
This study provides insight into the ways we can utilize bibliometric methods to empirically map and examine the trends, contours and boundaries of the field of CIE beyond the walls of academia. The findings contribute to our limited understanding of the publishing terrain in the field of CIDE, adding to the baseline data necessary for comparison in further bibliometric exploration of the field.

Author

• Robyn B. Read, University of Toronto