The Lions’ Share: A Bibliometric Analysis of Geography and Influence in Comparative International Education

• In Event: Theorizing Difference and Continuity: Nationhood, Culture, and Knowledge in Comparative Education

Proposal

The field of Comparative and International Education (CIE) has been marked by intense debate regarding its intellectual history, colonial entanglements, and future trajectories, visible in journal exchanges and last year’s CIES Conference. This debate has moved toward two seemingly competing historical narratives. On one hand, scholars like Takayama et al. (2017) call for a critical rethinking of knowledge production and circulation in the field and Shields and Paulson (2024) argue that CIE’s history is best understood through a lens of “complicity, whiteness and reckoning,” suggesting the field remains organized by a colonial logic that requires a critical “toppling of statues.” On the other hand, a counter-narrative articulated by Carnoy (2025) and Vickers (2020) claims this view is ahistorical, treats “the West” as a monolithic entity, and overlooks a rich history of anti-imperialist and Southern-led critiques. This counter-critique has been intensified by Vickers and Epstein (2024), who warn against the rise of an “intolerant new orthodoxy” they term “decolonial dogmatism.”
While this dialogue has been advanced mainly through theoretical debate, a systematic, empirical examination of the field’s publication history as data on itself can reveal much about not only the roots of CIE, but how it has (or not) changed. This paper aims to fill that gap by treating the scholarly record not merely as a collection of individual arguments, but as a source of structured data that represents the architecture of the field (Zupic and Cater, 2015). This study analyzes a comprehensive dataset of 6,112 peer-reviewed articles from four of the field's core English-language journals (Comparative Education, Comparative Education Review, Compare, and the International Journal of Educational Development) published over more than sixty years. This analysis seeks to answer three interrelated questions. First, it focuses on how the geographic representation of scholarship in core CIE journals has changed over time. Second, it examines over 270,000 citations to identify the field’s “intellectual canon” and reveal which works have been most central to the scholarly conversation. Finally, it employs a thematic analysis using a Structural Topic Model (STM) on all article abstracts to reveal how the substantive content and core research topics have evolved (Roberts et al., 2014).
The evidence reveals a field of dualities that speaks to both sides of this debate. Geographically, the data confirms the “lion’s share” narrative, validating the concerns of Takayama et al. (2017) about a “hierarchical structure in the field of knowledge production” historically dominated by scholars from Europe and North America. Yet, the intellectual mapping of cited references complicates a straightforward story of colonial hegemony. This analysis reveals a canon that, while still anchored in the Global North, is punctuated by the exceptional and enduring influence of Global South thinkers. The prominence of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed provides powerful empirical support for Carnoy’s (2025) assertion that “critical anti-imperialist ideas were somehow relegated to the backwaters... is simply ahistorical and untrue”. This duality suggests a field where a persistent Northern-centered power structure coexists with an influential critical tradition that challenges and complicates the kind of “totalizing anti-Westernism” that Vickers (2020) finds both divisive and historically inaccurate.
Perhaps most revealingly, the thematic analysis shows the field’s scholarly focus evolving in ways that reflect this contestation. The decline of older, technocratic paradigms of international aid demonstrates that CIE is moving on from the Cold War-era developmentalism that Carnoy (2025) agrees was part of its origins. In their place, new conversations have gained momentum, most notably the rise of “Critical Theories in CIE” as a topic itself. This finding suggests that the very call for a “major rethinking” initiated by Takayama et al. (2017) has been so influential that it is now a measurable and central feature of the scholarship published in the field’s core journals.
Ultimately, this study concludes that the “lion’s share” and the “contested terrain” are not mutually exclusive narratives. The evidence supports the argument of Shields and Paulson (2024) that whiteness has served as an “organising principle,” particularly in the geography of authorship. Simultaneously, the data validates Carnoy’s (2025) historical account of a field shaped by decades of anti-imperialist and feminist critique. This complex picture suggests that the field’s tradition may not need to be “trashed,” as its critics fear, but that a “critical recycling” is necessary, a process of sifting through the field’s history to diagnose its embedded problems while recovering its long-standing sources of internal critique. My hope is that this evidence-based perspective can help move the conversation beyond an impasse and toward a more constructive, self-aware path. It offers a way to pursue the “reparative histories” they call for by grounding the dialogue in shared empirical observations. It should be seen not as a silver bullet to end the debate, but a shared empirical foundation that invites interpretation from multiple perspectives, potentially fostering the “interdependent mode of academic engagement” that Takayama (2025) seeks.
While this analysis provides an empirical reference, its scope is necessarily limited. From a substantive perspective, the analysis focuses on only four English-language journals and uses institutional affiliation as a proxy for authorship geography, which may not fully capture the presence of Global South scholars working in Northern institutions. Additionally, a computational method such as the one employed here excels in identifying broad patterns and trends that might otherwise be missed by qualitative research. However, its potential to capture nuance and fine-grained analysis is limited. This is one of the reasons that the goal here is not to find a definitive answer to the current debate, but to bring forth additional information to contribute to the growth of CIE. Future research should expand this bibliometric approach to non-English journals, edited volumes, and dissertations to capture a more complete global landscape of knowledge production in CIE. Such work will be essential as the field continues to reshape its intellectual and structural foundations, an ongoing process that will influence both the topics studied and the voices heard.

Author

• Filipe Recch, The University Of Pittsburgh School of Education