‘Idea Diversity’ within Biological Education Research

This issue of JBE features papers that cover the usual wide range of topics, with authors coming from Asia, Australia, South America, North America, North Africa and Europe. This international authorship reflects the increasingly networked and connected academic community working in biological education. Technology makes it as simple to talk to someone across the world as it is to talk to a colleague across the road. When looking at the authorship within this issue, it also reflects a trend noted by Nabout et al. (2015) regarding increased multi-authorship of papers. Excluding the commentaries, the papers in this issue average just over 3 authors per paper. There have been numerous ideas put forward to explain the rise in multi-authorship, including the increasingly fragmented nature of academic disciplines, and the increase in interdisciplinary collaboration within research.

Whereas Biology is organised into a large number of subfields, the biological education research community has been viewed by Singer et al. (2012) as emerging in a more centralised way that cuts across disciplinary boundaries with a singular voice on education research. This would explain the diversity of subject matter that we see presented in JBE. From the research journals surveyed by Gul and Sozbilir (2016), it was found that JBE accounted for over 30% of published papers in Biological Education Research (BER) between 1997 and 2014. This means that JBE will consider a broad range of topic areas in its role as the only BER journal (Gul and Sozbilir 2016, 1636).

Drawing on an ecological analogy, Malsch and Tessier (2015) comment that just as biodiversity may be seen as a measure of an ecosystem’s overall health, ‘idea diversity’ may be seen as an indicator of the intellectual health of a research field. The level of idea diversity expressed within JBE should therefore be regarded as healthy.