The Geography of authorship regarding research in Education

Abstract

The first aim of this study was to build a theoretical framework considering the relevance of the author's provenance with respect to research on Education, and then to investigate the current patterns of the above-mentioned provenance. The author's provenance was found to have a bearing on a number of the research process components, including the following: collection, processing and interpretation of data, ethics of research, content of research, construction of theory, and improvement of practice. There was investigated the location of 18 523 authors of the articles published in 2012 in 219 Thomson Reuters indexed journals in the field of Education. An extremely uneven pattern emerged. Almost half of all the countries did not register a single author in this pool. Close to ninety per cent of the authors resided in the North American and Western European primary hub, and the Asian-Pacific weaker secondary hub of the international network of Education scholars. Smaller-order nodes occurred in Turkey, South Africa and Brazil. In conclusion, some recommendations for further research, and for rectifying this uneven pattern of scholarly activity, are made.