Studies in Higher Education 1976–2013: a retrospective using citation network analysis

Abstract

This paper provides a citation network analysis of the publications in Studies in Higher Education from 1976 to 2013 inclusive. This represents the entire history of the journal to date. It analyses the most published authors, most cited authors and most discussed topics using keywords. 1056 articles were taken from Web of Science^SM as a source of primary data. These articles were determined to have 32,738 references. A small percentage of these articles, 218 articles, had 1030 keywords. A data visualisation and manipulation software, Gephi, was used to provide a visual representation of the associated citation networks. We compare the results with other higher education citation analyses published elsewhere – a small, but growing area of research. Results indicate that the five most published authors throughout the journal's history are Richardson, Kember, Becher, Boud and Elton. The five most cited authors are Entwistle, Marton, Ramsden, Biggs and Becher. The five most discussed topics, using keywords, excluding higher education, are ‘doctoral education’, ‘assessment’, ‘phenomenography’, ‘student learning’ and ‘identity’, with a number of subordinate topic clusters amongst these. Results derived from this exercise are helpful in illuminating the evolving concerns of the journal and its readership, and providing a demonstration of a rigorous analytical technique for assessing journal citation data in the future.

Keywords:

• citation analysis
• cluster analysis
• network analysis
• Gephi
• citations

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Satu Alakangas and William Tang from the University of Melbourne library and IT support for their assistance.