Global diffusion of quality assurance research in higher education: a study on collaboration and concepts

ABSTRACT

Research on quality assurance in higher education has been expanding globally; however, there is still scope for exploring the depth of diffusion to evaluate its impact. To this end, collaboration structures between countries and common concepts in scientific texts were examined in this study. The bibliographic mapping method was employed to analyse data that was derived from the Web of Science. ‘Higher education’ and ‘Quality Assurance’ were the keywords searched and bibliographical data of 3080 scientific texts were extracted. Analyses on co-authorship and co-occurrence were made through the VOSviewer software tool. According to the results, research on quality assurance in higher education spread in half of the countries in the world as of 2021. Research intensity and collaboration relationships reveal that quality assurance research is spreading geographically in North America and Europe. In terms of concepts, although there has been an expansion over the years from a limited understanding of quality management to a more comprehensive perspective of quality assurance in education, it was seen that the central and static view of quality assurance is still solid.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• quality assurance
• diffusion
• bibliographic mapping

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).