Mapping the historical development and landscape of research about transnational higher education: a scientometric analysis from comparative and international perspectives

ABSTRACT

Transnational higher education (TNHE) has become an important research topic in international higher education (HE). Many universities have actively engaged in developing TNHE for diverse development goals, such as enhancing the internationalisation of HE, gaining financial benefits, and improving HE quality. While many researchers have explored TNHE-related issues from various perspectives (e.g. policy and management, learning and teaching, employability), relatively few studies have reviewed the historical development and landscape of TNHE research from comparative and international perspectives by adopting scientometric analysis. To fill this gap, we utilised CiteSpace to analyse TNHE-related research systematically. Based on reviewing journal articles indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database, we illustrate the landscape of TNHE research (e.g. the overview of publication development, researchers, and research themes). Then, we summarise the current research status of TNHE and provide suggestions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational higher education
• scientometric review
• comparative analysis
• research trend

Introduction

Since the 21st century, transnational higher education (TNHE) has become an important approach for academics, students, and educational resources to move around the world (Waters and Leung 2022). The origin of TNHE may be traced back to the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) leading to the global commodification and transnational operation of education (Hou, Montgomery, and McDowell 2014). Consequently, many developing countries (e.g. China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and United Arab Emirates) have ‘imported’ educational services from developed countries, such as the USA, the UK, and Australia (Altbach and Knight 2007). These practices are referred to as TNHE or cross-border education and have become increasingly popular due to the demand for international education in developing countries (Wilkins 2016).

Researchers (e.g. Dai 2020, 2021; Healey 2020; Levatino 2017; Li, Dai, and Zhang 2023; Sin, Leung, and Waters 2019; van der Rijst, Lamers, and Admiraal 2022; Wilkins and Neri 2019) have investigated TNHE-related issues in regional contexts, such as Asia, Europe, Oceania, Middle East, and America. The global expansion of TNHE has also brought about challenges, such as educational quality, university governance, and students’ development (Healey 2020). Meanwhile, a systematic review is missing from comparative and international perspectives. This scientometric review will systematically map the TNHE research field since its emergence. It aims to examine the development trends, challenges and opportunities for TNHE, particularly within the post-pandemic context. We ask two questions: 1) What are the research trends of TNHE? 2) Who are the major contributors of knowledge in the TNHE field?

Research method

To conduct a scientometric review of TNHE research since its emergence from approximately the early 2000s (Kosmützky and Putty 2016), CiteSpace is used as the analytic tool. CiteSpace is a scientometric software developed to map the knowledge domain of a research topic or field by synthesising and visualising bibliometric data into longitudinal trends and relational networks (e.g. countries, institutions, authors, journals, and topics) (Chen 2006). CiteSpace has two fundamental aspects: intellectual base and research fronts (Chen 2006). Intellectual base, as the evolving network of scientific literature interlinked by citation and co-citation, is the foundation from which clusters of concepts and underlying research issues emerge. These emerging trends are regarded as research fronts, each consisting of 40 to 50 recent articles that scholars frequently cite. CiteSpace could identify the ‘trajectories of competing paradigms, turning points of paradigm shifts, long-lasting research interests, and transient bursts of scholarly activities’ (Chen 2016, xvii). The current paper will examine the knowledge base and research fronts of global research on TNHE.

CiteSpace entails two data collection procedures: 1) to determine a reliable and reputable database that contains key bibliometric data (e.g. titles, authors, journals, keywords, abstracts, reference lists) of all publications of scientific value on a chosen topic; 2) to generate a unique dataset containing the inquired bibliometric information using keyword search in the database for scientometric analysis, where nodes and links are the two analytic units (Chen 2016). Nodes refer to the interconnected entities in a network displaying one type of bibliometric data. The important property of a node is betweenness centrality, which measures the number of shortest paths between all pairs of nodes that pass through a key node. It is visualised by scaling the size of the node and is useful for identifying authors/documents that broker collaboration with greater connectivity. The connections joining the nodes are known as links and their thickness indicates the strength of the interrelationship between two nodes.

The application of CiteSpace is independent of knowledge domain and commonly has three types of analysis (Fang, Yin, and Wu 2018). Collaboration analysis identifies the authors/institutions/countries that work more closely than others in forming a community of knowledge production in the field. Co-citation analysis identifies two items of research often cited together in ongoing literature, such as Author Co-citation Network (ACN) and Journal Co-citation Network (JCN). Keyword co-occurrence analysis relies on keyword co-occurrence matrix to display the research trends and topics by clusters either in a whole-field network or time-zone view tracking their progression overtime (Chen 2004).

Current studies utilising CiteSpace for systematic review in the global education field include those on international students (Jing et al. 2020) and higher education (Pan and An 2021; Tight 2012). However, no research has adopted a similar approach to reviewing the TNHE field. Different from some recent systematic reviews tapping the factors leading to successful development of TNHE programmes (Carvalho, Rosa, and Amaral 2022; Tran, Amando, and Santos 2023), we aim to identify the deep knowledge structure sustaining this field.

Research data

The current research utilised CiteSpace 5.8.R3 (64-bit) as the software. We first identified a set of keywords based on the widely recognised, and often interchangeable, terms for TNHE as input queries in the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection to retrieve all high-quality publications available on TNHE since 1999 (earliest record of TNHE research on WoS) until February 2022 (time of data collection). The keywords include transnational education (TNE), transnational higher education (TNHE), offshore education, borderless education, and cross-border education, synonyms referring to the international flow of educational services across contexts (Knight 2016; Yang 2008). WoS is one of the world’s largest and most authoritative bibliographic databases containing publications in multidisciplinary sciences. The indexed journal databases included as the core collection of WoS are Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). We confined our search indexes to these three sources to retrieve high-quality articles in the social sciences. A total of 574 articles were identified after data screening.

Results and discussion

TNHE research trajectory

Figure 1 displays the upward publication trend of TNHE research since 1999 and until 2021. Given that manuscripts in social sciences usually take one to two years from submission to publication, a downward trend in a certain year does not necessarily suggest a lack of scholarly interest or output. Thus, we delineate the TNHE research trajectory into three waves based on the three trend-lines in Figure 1, and previous review articles on TNHE development (Kosmützky and Putty 2016; Wilkins 2016), and thematic analysis of keyword citation bursts (Supplementary Figure S1).

Figure 1. The number of journal articles related to TNHE in WoS core collection with trend-lines (1999–2021).

Wave I (1999–2004): TNHE institutionalisation

The emergence of scientific literature on TNHE began from 1999 to 2004. At this stage, formats of TNHE were being institutionalised to suffice as research topics for academic inquiry, as some early literature focused on TNHE regulation and management. McBurnie and Ziguras (2001) were among the first authors to discuss TNHE regulation in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Australia and the impact of the GATS on transnational tertiary education (Ziguras 2003). These early studies set the stage for understanding TNHE practices modelled after the Australian-South Asian higher educational collaboration.

Wave II (2005–2014): TNHE development

TNHE development phase refers to the development of programmes, partnerships, national policies and practices in TNHE following the globalisation trend in the 21^st century. Of all 208 journal articles in this period, topics progressed from TNHE strategy and professionalisation (Scherrer 2005; Shams and Huisman 2012), management and quality assurance (Chapman and Pyvis 2006), regulation and marketisation (Mok 2008; Oleksiyenko, Cheng, and Yip 2013), to student and faculty experiences (Leung and Waters 2013; Seah and Edwards 2006; Wilkins, Stephens Balakrishnan, and Huisman 2012). Critical perspectives of TNHE development also emerged in this phase (Blackmur 2007).

Wave III (2015–2022): TNHE proliferation

TNHE proliferation refers to the fast growth of TNHE programmes and research publications globally. In total, 358 journal articles were found in these recent seven years. While previous research topics consistently appeared, some conceptual frameworks became more prevalent, such as globalisation, internationalisation of higher education, and student mobility (Tight 2021; Wilkins and Lan 2022; Zhang 2021).

Major contributors to the field

Prolific authors and collaboration networks

Table 1 demonstrates the Top 10 most productive authors in the TNHE research field by publication frequency, measured by the number of articles published by a scholar as the first author. In the top 5, the most prolific author is Stephen Wilkins, Professor of Strategy and Marketing at The British University in Dubai. He has published 14 articles on TNHE management and development in the Arab Gulf States regarding student satisfaction and organisational management (Wilkins and Juusola 2018; Wilkins and Neri 2019; Wilkins and Stephens Balakrishnan 2013). The second is Ka Ho Mok, whose research focuses on TNHE policy, governance, and student development in East Asia (Mok 2008; Mok and Han 2016a, 2016b, 2017; Mok et al. 2018). Nigel Healey, Professor of International Higher Education at the University of Limerick, is the third productive author. His research focuses on the internationalisation of higher education, policy, and TNHE management (Healey 2015, 2017, 2023). The fourth productive author, Ravinder Sidhu, is Associate Professor at School of Education, The University of Queensland, Australia. Her research about TNHE mainly focuses on globlisation of universities and international student mobilities in East Asia. The fifth productive scholar is Johanna L. Waters, Professor of Human Geography at the UCL Department of Geography. Her research critically examines student mobility, social reproduction, and the transnational space of TNHE in Hong Kong (Waters and Leung 2012, 2013). Given that the TNHE field is relatively new within two decades of development, the author collaboration analysis did not produce a network (Supplementary Figure S2). While some prolific authors have regular collaborators, such as Johanna L. Waters and Maggi W. H. Leung, the links between co-authors do not extend to other nodes, suggesting that author collaboration in TNHE research is yet to be internationalised.

Table 1. A list of top 10 most productive authors in the TNHE field.

Frequency	Author	Institution	First Publication
14	Stephen Wilkins	The British University in Dubai	2011
13	Ka Ho Mok	The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong	2008
8	Nigel Healey	University of Limerick	2008
7	Ravinder Sidhu	University of Queensland	2006
6	Johanna L. Waters	University College London	2013
5	Jane Knight	University of Toronto	2006
5	Syed Zamberi Ahmad	Abu Dhabi University	2015
5	Kun Dai	The Chinese University of Hong Kong	2019
4	Maggi W. H. Leung	Utrecht University	2013
4	Lan He	Yunnan University of Finance and Economics	2016

Country collaboration analysis

Figure 2 shows the country collaboration network in TNHE research, where 68 countries/regions established collaborative relationships. As demonstrated by the circle size, Australia published the most articles (118), followed by the UK (101), China (89), USA (57), United Arab Emirates (26), and the Netherlands (25). Notably, those countries were some of the largest sending (Australia, England, USA, the Netherlands) and host (China, UAE) countries of TNHE. Among the most published sending countries, only the USA has the greatest collaborative relationships with other countries with a betweenness centrality of 0.53. In comparison, Australia (0.04), China (0.00), and UAE (0.04) establish fewer collaborations with other countries, implying a regional/local approach to TNHE research collaboration. This finding is in line with institution collaboration analysis (Supplementary Figure S3), where no institution is a key node in the TNHE research network and most institutions remain scattered in a field of rather isolated actors (i.e. prolific single author representing their institutions) yet to be networked. Therefore, global collaboration in TNHE research shall be encouraged.

Figure 2. A visualization of country collaboration network.

Author co-citation analysis

Author co-citation network in Figure 3 presents authors frequently co-cited in TNHE research. The analysis sums the publications cited of a scholar as first author. A total of 178 nodes and 243 co-citation links were identified. Table 2 shows the 10 most cited authors and their co-citation frequency. The top three cited authors are Jane Knight, Stephen Wilkins, and Grant McBurnie. Knight is Adjunct Professor in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at University of Toronto, specialising in the internationalisation of higher education. McBurnie was a senior research associate at RMIT university, known for his two co-authored books on TNHE with Ziguras (McBurnie and Ziguras 2006; Ziguras and McBurnie 2015). His research focuses on international student mobility and institutional governance in TNHE.

Figure 3. A visualisation of author co-citation network.

Table 2. Top 10 most cited authors with co-citation frequency.

Author	Frequency	BC	Author	Frequency	BC
Knight J.	208	0.48	Altbach P.G.	95	0
Wilkins S.	114	0.04	Ziguras C.	71	0.30
McBurnie G.	113	0.27	OECD	67	0.33
Marginson S.	101	0.26	British Council	62	0.02
Mok K. H.	96	0.55	Huang F.	60	0.02

The capacity of an author to join other nodes in the network is assessed by betweenness centrality, indicating the author’s scientific impact in the knowledge domain (Yan and Ding 2009). Those core authors are Ka Ho Mok (0.55), Knight (0.48), and OECD (0.33). In particular, Ka Ho Mok has both considerable output (see Table 1) and scientific impact (0.55) in TNHE research. The works of other prolific authors from non-educational disciplines are less impactful with lower betweenness centrality, such as Wilkins (0.04) and Waters (0.23). Some other highly cited authors in TNHE publications are from the international/global education background, such as Knight (0.48), Ziguras (0.30), McBurnie (0.27), and Marginson (0.26). These results indicate that the current TNHE field is dominated by scholars from global higher education compared with other disciplines that also conduct TNHE research (e.g. management and geography) – when both knowledge production and circulation are considered. This inference is corroborated by further discipline distribution analysis where disciplinary clusters appear rather distinct with education taking predominance (Supplementary Figure S4). OECD is also a key node in the network given the significance of its joint guidelines with UNESCO on quality provision in cross-border higher education (OECD 2005).

Journal co-citation analysis

Table 3 displays the 10 most cited journals by co-citation frequency among all 195 journals in the journal co-citation network (Figure 4). The 10 journals all feature international or higher education. Journal of Studies in Higher Education tops the list with 274 co-citations, followed by Higher Education and Studies in Higher Education. While journals with high impact factors are cited more often, two relatively low-impact journals and low co-citation frequency, Teaching in Higher Education (0.31) and International Journal of Educational Management (0.22), are the key players joining other nodes in the network. Particularly, some prolific authors in Table 1 have published in International Journal of Educational Management (Ahmad, Buchanan, and Ahmad 2016; He and Liu 2018; Healey 2018; Mok 2008; Wilkins and Stephens Balakrishnan 2013), but none in Teaching in Higher Education, suggesting a research focus on educational management in TNHE. While International Higher Education is not a WoS journal in the original dataset, it is highly cited in the references of the sourced articles and thus becomes a key node in the co-citation network.

Figure 4. A visualisation of the journal co-citation network.

Table 3. Top 10 most cited journals with co-citation frequency.

Journal	Frequency	BC	Impact Factor (2021–2022)
Journal of Studies in International Education	274	0.11	2.762
Higher Education	263	0.15	3.947
Studies in Higher Education	142	0.2	4.017
Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management	134	0.1	2.553
International Journal of Educational Management	115	0.22	1.838
International Higher Education	112	0.07	–
International Journal of Educational Development	88	0.17	1.873
Higher Education Research and Development	88	0.08	2.849
Higher Education Policy	84	0.06	1.640
Teaching in Higher Education	84	0.31	2.750

Emerging trends in the TNHE field

References with citation bursts

Citation bursts indicate the increased attention academic works receive in a period of time, offering insights into the emerging topics that scholars pay attention to. Reference burst detection in CiteSpace summarises a list of published articles with the strongest citation bursts and the time range in which the strongest bursts take place. Table 4 shows the top 25 references with the strongest citation bursts in TNHE research from 1999 to 2022. The beginning of dark blue blocks marks the publication year of an article and the blue continuum indicates the duration it has been cited; the red blocks in-between refer to the years when citations increased dramatically. Each block represents a year. As shown, Davis, Olsen, and Anthony’s (2000) conference paper on Australian offshore education was the first cited work in TNHE research by journal articles included in the data, with a citation burst from 2005 to 2006, corresponding to the emergence of TNHE as a field in the same period. Since 2009, citation bursts of articles have been persistent over time, focusing on the emerging trends (Dunn and Wallace 2006; Huang 2007; McBurnie and Ziguras 2006; Olds 2007), strategies (Becker 2009; Wilkins and Huisman 2012), framework and practices (Altbach and Knight 2007) of TNHE – themes that continued to characterise ongoing publications.

Table 4. Top 25 references with strongest citation bursts.

References	Strength	Begin	End	1999–2022
Davis et al. (2000)	3.96	2005	2006
McBurnie and Ziguras (2006)	11.27	2009	2016
Dunn and Wallace (2006)	7.04	2009	2014
Olds (2007)	4.1	2009	2012
Naidoo (2009)	6.71	2011	2016
Becker (2009)	4.34	2011	2014
Huang (2007)	4.27	2011	2014
Altbach and Knight (2007)	6.77	2013	2016
Smith (2009)	4.62	2013	2016
Wilkins and Huisman (2012)	9.12	2015	2018
Shams and Huisman (2012)	5.85	2015	2018
Miller‐Idriss and Hanauer (2011)	4.54	2015	2016
Heffernan et al. (2010)	4.06	2015	2018
Knight (2016)	10.89	2017	2022
Healey and Michael (2015)	5.06	2017	2020
Kosmützky and Putty (2016)	5.01	2017	2022
Healey (2016)	4.71	2017	2020
Knight (2015)	4.37	2017	2018
Healey and Michael (2015)	3.88	2017	2018
Wilkins (2017)	4.69	2019	2022
Hoare (2013)	4.28	2019	2022
Levatino (2017)	4.26	2019	2022
Mok (2016a)	3.99	2019	2022
Hu and Willis (2017)	3.99	2019	2022
Ahmad and Buchanan (2017)	3.93	2019	2022

Keyword analysis over time

To understand when TNHE research keywords emerged and how they are related in a co-occurrence network over time, a time-zone view of keyword co-occurrence was shown in Figure 5. The time spot of a keyword suggests its first occurrence in publication. Once a keyword appears again in later literature, its ring size becomes slightly bigger with increased occurrence. This explains why ‘transnational education’ is the largest circle, followed by ‘transnational higher education’ and ‘higher education’. The coloured line joining two keywords implies their co-occurrence in one or more publications. We summarise TNHE research development from 1999 to early 2022 into three themes: 1) TNHE policies and quality assurance; 2) Student motivations and experiences; and 3) Transnational fields and student mobility. We conclude this synthesis by suggesting the research gaps and future issues within the current context of post-pandemic TNHE.

Figure 5. A time-zone visualisation of keyword co-occurrence.

TNHE policies and quality assurance

Since its inception, TNHE has featured the internationalisation of higher education as an overall win-win goal for both sending and host countries (Altbach and Knight 2007). However, when this universal framework is implemented locally, TNHE programmes are often caught between the national demand for globalisation and the specific logic of governance within local institutions (Mok and Han 2017). Scholars have explored the interconnections of global-national-local sectors in TNHE across a range of locations, including China (Han 2021; Mok and Han 2017), Ethiopia (Tamrat and Teferra 2021), Finland and Russia (Kallo and Semchenko 2016). The disparity between policy goals, such as internationalising education and talent development, and the reality of local TNHE practices raise concerns over educational equity, management, and quality assurance (e.g. Sharp 2017). Relevant problems have become the targets of strategy-making (Neri and Wilkins 2019). While much focus is on the top-down factors determining TNHE strategy- or policy-making, the bottom-up forces have not brought about significant shifts in programme management and quality supervision. Despite 41 publications on quality and quality assurance in TNHE, TNHE quality delivery remains a challenge, most possibly due to a lack of universal standard on quality assessment, programme management, and the global-local disjuncture (Lim et al. 2016).

Student motivations and experiences

Another stream of TNHE literature focuses on students’ choices for TNHE, their programme and learning experiences, and their transition/adaptation in TNHE. Students’ perspectives from some popular TNHE hubs (e.g. China and East Asia) have been investigated. Regarding school choice, Chinese students consider TNHE a middle destination between domestic higher education and overseas higher education out of concerns for economic affordability, academic aptitude, and personal development (e.g. Fang and Wang 2014). Malaysian students choose Australian offshore education for positional investments or self-transformations (Pyvis and Chapman 2007). Research on student experiences largely revolve around their perceptions of quality, learning experiences, and sociocultural adaptations (e.g. Dai, Matthews, and Renshaw 2020). While students were generally satisfied with programme and teaching quality at international branch campuses (e.g. Ahmad and Buchanan 2017; Wilkins, Stephens Balakrishnan, and Huisman 2012), others were unsatisfied with interpersonal contact and service processes (Bhuian 2016). It seems that students’ evaluations of TNHE quality varied by dimensions, some of which are not included in institutional quality assessment and are pursued differently across programmes/institutions. Therefore, quality assurance and policy-making need to concern the specific dimensions of programme experience that pertain to the needs of various stakeholders (e.g. students, faculty, institution).

Students in TNHE also face the demand of adapting to the academic norms of Western education. The experience of learning between two systems may result in intercultural transitions (Dai, Lingard, and Musofer 2020; Yu 2021). For example, Yu (2021) pointed out the symbolic power of Western higher education reflected in Chinese students’ perceptions of TNHE. Learning adaptation also occurs for students facing two national sets of educational logic, such as hierarchical versus liberal learning management (Pyvis and Chapman 2005). Other sociocultural challenges posed by TNHE may exist in multilingual socialisation and academic identification (Chapman and Pyvis 2006; Ou and Gu 2021), reflecting the potential cross-cultural ignorance in teaching and learning practices between TNHE partners (Dai, Matthews, and Reyes 2020).

Transnational fields and student mobility

The third theme demonstrates a sociological focus on TNHE in global mobility and transnational migration. Geographically, some countries/regions received greater research attention than others and have thus become transnational fields of student mobility. These places dominating current literature are ‘Australia’ (0.36), ‘China’ (0.33), ‘Asia’ (0.24), ‘Hong Kong’ (0.21), ‘Malaysia’ (0.14), and ‘Singapore’ (0.1). The Asia Pacific has obviously become a TNHE hub of knowledge economies within the internationalisation trend that diversified international student mobility. Regarding TNHE mobility via transnationalism, scholars have focused the socio-political motivations of governments and sociocultural motivations of students in pursuing TNHE. Specifically, government policymakers emphasise the enhancement of soft power by bringing TNHE into local higher education fields (Mok 2012) as infrastructures of im/mobility that keep students within the local economy (Kleibert 2022). The growing impact of geo-politics on international student mobility would further promote TNHE into local higher education fields, especially when students plan for overseas learning have taken personal safety and potential symbolic violence encountered with the anti-Asian movement since the COVID-19 crisis (Hartmann and Mok 2021; Mok and Mok 2023).

Compared to traditional student mobility requiring substantial economic resources, TNHE offers students and families an opportunity to achieve greater social mobility and social reproduction at home (Tsang 2013). Thus, TNHE also serves as transnational spaces of flexible mobility and strategic investments (Gargano 2009). From a transnational perspective, there is a considerable intersection of macro-, meso-, and micro-level factors that influence students’ mobility choices in TNHE, reflecting the dynamics of policies, practices, programmes, and individual cosmopolitan aspirations in this field (Li, Haupt, and Lee 2021). Having experienced the challenging time resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic era, scholars should also take the broader geo-political perspectives when analysing the patterns and development of international learning (Mok 2022; Guan, Mok, and Yu 2023).

Regarding the multi-faceted dynamics of TNHE, one question has rarely been addressed. That is, TNHE for whose interest? Student experiences in TNHE are important, but probably not as highlighted as the neoliberal framework of higher education they represent in the global commodification of TNHE (Knight 2008). No doubt, the TNHE field is filled with complexities and contradictions (Hou, Montgomery, and McDowell 2014). Yet it is critical for scholars, especially those who serve both insider and outsider positions in the field to interrogate the core issues underlying the gap between decision-makers distanced from educational practices, and education practitioners/students alienated or objectified by policies. Intuitively, quality assurance of TNHE is the bridge across policies and practices in serving the interest of different stakeholders in the TNHE system for its sustainable development. In analysing these issues, scholars point out the cross-cultural differences that may distinguish host and sending countries’ systematic differences in their educational approaches (Dai, Matthews, and Reyes 2020). However, critical reflections should also be given to the power dynamics embedded in TNHE, such as neoliberalism versus nationalism, and potential colourism that racialises faculty experiences in transnational education delivery (Koh and Lin Sin 2022).

Finally, in a post-pandemic era of international student mobility and geopolitical uncertainties, TNHE equally face opportunities and challenges. TNHE may increasingly become a substitute for international higher education (Mok et al. 2021) and more TNHE programmes may emerge soon, forming new regional education hubs, for example, intra-country branch campues operated by Hong Kong institutions in the Greater Bay Area (see Dai, Wilkins, and Zhang 2023). The underlying dynamics and complexities reviewed above may also become more obvious as TNHE policy priorities shift with global geopolitics and national interests.

Conclusion

This article provides a scientometric review of TNHE-related research by analysing publications archived in WoS. Findings illustrate the landscape of the TNHE research, including trajectory, active scholars, key journals, networks, and emerging trends, offering an international and comparative perspective. Regarding how TNHE has developed in a globalised world and how it will develop in a post-pandemic world recovering from these years of anti-globlisation, we offer some suggestions. First, there is much room for researchers, institutions, and countries to collaborate beyond cultures in identifying the common problems of TNHE across its sub-fields and seek shared solutions. Second, much interdisciplinary collaboration is needed to bridge knowledge gaps, and make TNHE a truly networked field with diversified research fronts. Third, alternative research paradigms may be brought in to foster methodological pluralism and bring practical changes, such as critical studies or action-oriented research. These directions may support researchers from different regions to explore TNHE-related issues more effectively. In conclusion, although we have begun to resume normalcy after COVID-19, the closure of national borders and the rise of online learning during the crisis may have significantly affected the future development of TNHE. More research is needed to track changes in terms of motivations, student experiences and destination/learning mode choices at the individual level. More research should also be conducted to examine how factors at the macro and meso levels (i.e. broader political economy and institutional arrangements) would have affected international student mobility in general and TNHE in particular. A limitation of this review is that it only focuses on WoS indexed data and future study may explore a broader literature scope.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2023.2292517

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong [Direct Grant for Research].