Visualizing the Study of International Higher Education Based on Co-word Network

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Visualizing the Study of International Higher Education Based on
Co-word Network
HOU Jianhua1, PAN Li2
1. School of humanities in Dalian University, Dalian, China, 116600
2. Education school, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China, 116029
Abstract: Higher Education, a higher education academic periodical which is approbated by
international scholars, its bibliography is regarded as data sample with using it’s entire 365 chapters
(include article, proceedings paper and review ) of publication from the year 2005 to 2009, with the
assistance of Citespace (a visual software concerning newest scientific metrology), a high degree of
internationalization about higher education was set up by plotting a visual spectrum of the authors’
nationality in this periodical; in addition, visual spectrum of keywords co-word network belongs to the
365 literatures are plotted by applying Citespace, on this basis, through the central co-occurrence
analysis of keywords, further exploration of the latest five-year research on topical issues of
international higher education is in progress.
Keywords: International Higher Education, co-word network, Visual Analysis, CiteSpace
Introduction
Applying the info-visual technology enabled the user to observe, browse and understand the information
easily, as well as discovering the rules and patterns that the data hidden [1].Series applications of
Citespace which based on the platforms of Java were developed by Chen Chaomei who is the vice
professor of Drexel University in USA, as well as the professional lecturer of Yangtse River scholar in
WISE Laboratory of Dalian University of Technology. Thus, abstract data will be expressed with the
visual form by the Citespace applications in order to facilitate further data analysis, rules discovery and
decision support. Citespace is visual information technology software of a new generation, it is suited to
multielement, time-sharing and dynamic analysis of complex networks [2, 3].Consequently, this software
is becoming a new and widely used instrument for scientific metrology. For this article, the version for
using is Citespace which was issued in September 10, 2009. The unique feature of Citespace that
depends on the visual analysis of scientific literature is to monitor various kinds of patterns from the
scientific literature, such as fronts of research, topical issues, tendency and movement. In this article,
Citespace is used to determine the international higher education research focus over last five-year.
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1 Periodicals Selection and Data Sources
There will be a group of people plunging into the study of certain fields while these specifically
academic realms are independent and self-contained. With the extensively and deeply investigation, the
academic periodicals which are themed by certain fields are emerged as the situation requires. In this
sense, the emergence of academic periodicals should be a significant symbol of independently academic
discipline appearances which evolved from certain fields. Compared with literature, such as scholarly
monograph, academic periodicals have a penetrative and direct grasp on topical issues and frontiers of
academic realms. Selecting the core periodicals of higher education research would support the
exploration of international higher education research focus. As a result, choosing high international
periodical which is under authorities in the international higher education sector is vitally necessary.
Founded in 1972, higher education is accredited by the international academic community as an
authoritative academic periodical which has the highest level of internationalization on the study of
higher education. This periodical is published by a celebrated academic press named Kluwer Academic
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in the Netherlands, world-wide reputation is enjoyed by this press could not be ignored. Incidentally,
there are 8 periodicals published annually. The 5-year impact factor of higher education on the JCR of
ISI is 1.119, and this journal is located in the front of SSCI, which is an instrumentation of search for
higher education professional issues. Its published manuscripts come from various countries and
multi-published in English, the impact factor of higher education can be carried out to prove its
authorities in research area of higher education. However, in order to further proving this journal’s
internationalization degree, source countries of their authors were located to reflect and confirm the high
degree of higher education (Generally speaking, the content of published articles are mostly concerned
about the authors’ nationalities and regions ). In the SSCI database belonging to the Web of Science to
retrieve, documents known as Higher Education, the time limit in the 2005-2009, a total of 379
literature data retrieved. There are 345 articles, 12 proceeding papers and 8 articles respectively, all the
information that contain a total of 365 articles bibliography that extracted by keywords. Supported by
the Citespace , visual analysis on the source countries and regions of 365 Journal articles’ authors who
published articles during 2005-2009, spectrum of intuitive information visualization was generated.
See figure 1.
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Figure 1 Illustrates Higher Education authors’ origin (country and region).
In figure 1, the size of the cycle (corresponding to the performance of the country’s sizes) represents the
frequency of the country emergency. The larger circle (corresponding to the larger national English fonts)
shows more frequency the authors occur in the country (from the same country, same author according
to the actual number of cumulative appear-frequency terms), on the contrary, the smaller. With the
assistance of Summary Table which is a part of Export belongs to the Citespace
educed the
emergence frequency of authors’ nation, among them, AUSTRALIA 62 times, USA 48 times,
ENGLAND 48 times, the NETHERLANDS 20 times, CANADA 22 times, SOUTH AFRICA 18 times,
SPAIN 16 times, SWEDEN 14 times, NORWAY 11 times, ISRAEL 11 times, the PEOPLE’S
REPUBLIC OF CHINA 9 times, GERMANY 8 times, JAPAN 7 times, SOUTH KOREA 7 times,
additionally, several countries like TURKEY, CHILE, MEXICO and other countries, likewise, they
had articles published. According to the information above, it can be seen that in Higher Education
there is a wide range of authors’ nations, thereamong, NORTH AMERICA, EUROPE, OCEANIA,
AFICA, ASIA account for a large proportion. However, the sparse and dense connection in figure 1
indicates the level of cooperation between the national author and foreign author, more connection,
more cooperation, thus demonstrating certain country has a high degree of internationalization in the
field of higher education research. From figure 1, it is clear that most of the connection is from
American authors to foreign authors, at the same time, this also confirms that Unit States has a dominant
power as well as a high-impact on international higher education currently.
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Meanwhile, we carried out information visualization analysis on the authors’ nation of several
influential journals; these journals are retrieved by SSCI and in relation to higher education. According
to the above analysis, Higher Education has a much higher degree of internationalization than Journal
of Higher Education (Most authors are from the United States) and Research in Higher Education (Most
authors are from the United Kingdom), etc. Therefore, combining the authors’ nation and influence,
demonstrated that selecting "Higher Education" as the sample data to track the international higher
education hot area of research is reasonable and feasible.
2 Visual Analysis of Higher Education by Keywords Co-word Network
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Utilizing Citespace to draw literature in order to co-occur keywords network spectrum, the first step is
to conduct united manipulation on the data of bibliography, and have a merge on the similar word or
different word which in the same meaning but has dissimilar writing habits, for instance, unified the
word ‘higher-education’ into ‘higher education’, unified ‘universities’ into ‘university’, unified
‘internationalization’ and ‘globalization’ into ‘globalization’, changed ‘mergers’ into ‘amalgamation’,
unified ‘academic performance’ and ‘research performance’ into ‘performance’. Afterwards, with the
assistance of Citespace , the co-word network which was made up of keywords belongs to 2005-2009
higher education generated visual spectrum, considering research needs after the spectrum generated,
meanwhile, removing no real meaning word out, such as ‘higher education’, ‘perception’, ‘perspective’,
‘model’, ‘education’, ‘Australia’, and ‘style ’,etc. Ultimately, figure 2 are formed.
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Figure 2 According to the keywords of 2005-2009 Higher Education, the co-word network spectrum are
generated
Co-word analysis is a sort of content-analysis technique, through analyzing the co-occurrence form of
item pairs (Word or noun phrase pairs) in the same text theme, the relationships between related topics
belong to disciplines represented by the text are confirmed, and then development of academic
disciplines are explored. In this article, co-word analysis of keywords are primarily selected for
exploiting text knowledge of Higher Education. Keywords are one of the most important components of
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academic papers. Although there are only a few keywords in the article, as well as sharing little space
relatively, keywords are the essence of paper. Keywords cannot only be used to retrieval the literature,
but also can benefit the user for learning the fields and contents that literature related. Through the
analysis of high-frequency keywords, subjects’ research focus can be found [4]. In figure 2, the size of
the cycle represents the frequency that keywords emerged, more frequency related to more emergences
of the keywords. It is particularly noteworthy that figure 2 clearly demonstrated the degree of keywords
co-occurrence, namely, centrality of keywords. The font size of keywords in the spectrum were set to
denote the central strength of keywords, in other words, the font size of keyword in the spectrum
represents the centrality strength of this keyword in the co-word network, the bigger the font of
keyword is, the stronger centrality it will have in the literature cluster, the better chance it will present
conjointly with other keywords and more influence it will have on the literature cluster, from the
viewpoint of knowledge theory, generally, the keywords with high centrality are issues of researchers’
concern for a period of time, that is, the focus and advanced exploration of research. [5]
3 Explore the Research Focus of International Higher Education
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Citespace is not only able to provide intuitive and visual knowledge spectrum, but also it allows the
user through background processing to receive the detailed data which correspond with the spectrum.
On the basis of obtaining figure 2, keyword frequency and central data of 2005-2009 Higher Education
are educed with the functional Summary Table which belongs under Export of Citespace . See table 1.
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sequence
number
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Keywords(English)
university
science
globalization
knowledge
Students
Quality
conceptions
Outcomes
policy
student learning
Gender
Faculty
performance
management
governance
State
innovation
productivity
Triple-helix
Industry-government relation
Centrality
0.30
0.28
0.18
0.17
0.13
0.12
0.12
0.09
0.09
0.09
0.08
0.08
0.06
0.06
0.05
0.04
0.03
0.03
0.03
0.03
Frequency
45
17
21
16
22
19
9
12
8
7
12
11
18
11
8
3
6
6
6
5
Table 1 Centrality and frequency (sorted by centrality size of keywords) of the keywords on 2005-2009
Higher Education
According to table 1 it can be found that the keywords with high centrality may not have higher
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frequency than the keywords with low frequency, in other words, the centrality size of keywords is not
entirely proportional to the size of the frequency in co-word network, this is one of the reasons why this
paper does not use the frequency of keywords as unique element to determine the focus of higher
education research.
4 Conclusion
According to the data that figure 1 and table 2 contained, research focus of latest five-year international
higher education is received. university, as a place for higher education, it enjoys the highest level of
frequency and centrality; science contains the natural knowledge and social perception, it is a research
content of higher education; globalization is one of the topical issues, educators regarded globalization
as an inevitable requirement of open-education; knowledge is pursued for it plays a dominant role in
higher education; students are objects of research, they are the recipients of education; quality criteria
of research perceived by academics in social sciences at higher education; the quality of Higher
Education are paid attention for it connected with the quality of recipients; conceptions, outcomes,
policy, student learning, gender, faculty, performance, management, governance, state, innovation,
productivity, Triple-helix and Industry-government relation are all ranked by their centrality and
frequency, as well as these keywords are contents and objects of higher education. The objects of study
is focusing on the university, staff and student, thus, it also inherits the core of higher education research;
the focus of research contents are higher education globalization, governance and management of higher
education, quality assurance and assessment of higher education, performance evaluation of higher
education, theories and concepts of higher education, science and knowledge innovation, gender
differentiated education, government-industry-university-research labs(Triple-helix model) and several
other areas. Schiller is an authority and pioneer in the research field of European higher education, he
provides the most comprehensive and mature classification for higher education research themes. When
he realized the lack of “a general map” in higher education research community, he divided higher
education research themes into four categories: the quality and structure of higher education, related
knowledge and disciplines of higher education, the people related with higher education and scientific
research, organization and management of higher education. [6]What we researched above have largely
included in schiller’ incorporation of higher education research theme. As a result, the reasonableness
and scientificity of our research are demonstrated by one important aspect.
Author in Brief:
Hou Jianhua, School of humanities in Dalian University, Dalian, China. Zip code: 116600
E-mail: [email protected]
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