Research paper
Teacher education research in the global dimension: Bibliometric perspective

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2022.103801Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Teacher education research is an expanding field of study driven by multilayer scholarly networks.

  • Teacher education researchers collaborate in stable topical and geographical clusters.

  • Studies on teacher education related to teaching subjects constitute structured research field.

  • International collaborations of teacher education scholars are embedded in historically established countries' interactions.

  • The topical domain includes education insiders, teaching profession, teaching, comparative studies, inclusion, and IT.

Abstract

This paper considers the teacher education research from a global perspective. We use bibliometric analysis of the papers on teacher education to provide insights into research capacity, research patterns, and the topical variety of the field. Teacher education research appears as an intensively expanding research field with a sustainable research agenda and structure. The study brings evidence that the representatives of globally visible teacher education research build stable research communities within teaching subject areas. International collaborations of teacher education researchers are based on historical and cultural conventions of countries’ interactions.

Introduction

In the new millennium, teacher education has become a regular topic of the research agenda (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015a). The growing acceptance of teacher education (Tatto & Menter, 2019) and a shift of several countries, namely US, Finland, Sweden, and Portugal, towards research-based policies (Cochran-Smith, 2008; Özçinar, 2015) arouse interest of both researchers and policy-makers. The systematic politicization of teacher education (Brandenburg et al., 2016), accompanied by the additional financial support (Swennen et al., 2017), requests for additional teacher education studies. Considering teacher education of the last century as “a relatively young field” (Zeichner, 1999; cited in Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2006, p. 755), Murray, Campbell, et al. (2008a) point out that comparing to other disciplines of education, teacher education can be still regarded as underdeveloped area. Based on the study on initial teacher education in Australia, Murray, Nuttall and Mitchell (2008b) conclude that the research quality and relevance had significantly improved since the 1980s, but some topical slots remain under-researched. In the later publications, Murray (2014) and Murray et al. (2019) continue to address the under-researched area of teacher education. Assessing the present state of the research on teacher training, Cochran-Smith and Villegas consider it already as “complex, massive in size and sprawling in scope” (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015a; p. 389). Against the background of the emerged social, political, and scientific conjuncture, teacher education has become a study object of different scholars’ communities.

The interdisciplinary nature of teacher education and the country-based origin of teacher education research caused a fragmented structure of the field (Korthagen, 2016; Murray, Campbell, et al., 2008a). Teacher education issues are studied by different disciplines, in particular, Psychology, Economy, Management, Pedagogy, Philosophy, and Sociology. These disciplines generate both data and methodology sources that the teacher education research capitalizes on (Borko et al., 2007; Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015a) and which contribute to the multiplicity of the research field structure.

Craig (2016) and Darling-Hammond et al. (2005) conclude that teacher education was shaped through historical, cultural, and social contexts. The international differences of initial teacher education stem from national history, culture, economics, and politics conceptualizing a “teacher preparation research as historically situated social practice” (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015a, p. 380). The scholars “must remember that context matters and recognize the particular and local with deeper understanding” (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2013, p. 510).

Due to the strong connection between national teacher education systems and state primary and secondary education, different countries shift usually the research focus on teacher education issues, pursuing their goals in education, social, and economic realms. These determinants influence a topical and methodological development of the teacher training research and form ‘endemic’ research communities on national and disciplinary levels. Finally, the parallel studies on teacher education resulted in an emerging “sprawling uneven field” (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015b, p. 8) with a fragmented structure.

To improve and coordinate teacher education research, we generated a big picture of the entire field in terms of its contributors, capacity, and topical diversity. This study defines the outlines of the research field and determinants for its further development, elucidating contributions from a range of disciplines and researchers’ collaborations.

Mapping the segments and the research patterns of research field confirms the position of teacher education as a substantive and separate research area and points at the potential for the improvement of the research field capacity. Additionally, a deeper understanding of the nature of the field exemplified in nation-based and disciplinary communities of scholars will support teacher education researchers, research managers, and policy-makers developing national and international interdisciplinary collaborative research strategies.

This study presents a large-scale picture of teacher education research based on the analysis of the related scientific literature. The main idea is to provide insights into the structure of the teacher education research using bibliometric analysis. We identify the structure of the entire research field, its determinants, and current trends by aggregating the related publications metadata. We focus also on publication output, journals, contributors to the field, and its topical diversity. For mapping of the research field, we visualize the teacher education research domain in terms of publication dynamics over the whole publication period until recent times (until 2018), publication output of nation-states, prominent scholars, journals, the position of the research field in the scientific knowledge structure, and topical agenda. The researched issues of the field discover a capacity of the publishing research communities, intellectual structure comprising the most influential works of the field, and conceptual structure expressed in topical variety.

The research question of the study is, What is the extent of the teacher education research globally and the determinants of its structure?

Section snippets

Teacher education research field

Clarke (2001) concluded that only at the very end of the 20th century, did teacher education become established as a field of study in its own right after analyzing journals, publications of field-specific reference texts, and public meetings addressing issues in teacher education. An “emerging, complex, and multifaceted field” (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015a, p. 379) is “made up of multiple contested territories and which borrows from many disciplines” (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015a, p.

Data and methodology

By the term teacher education research field, we understand a set of publications on teacher training in internationally available academic journals. The global dimension of the field appears from the big collection of peer-reviewed journals indexed in Scopus. Inviting authors from all over the world and publishing predominantly in English language journals offer access to the global knowledge exchange. The corpus of research papers includes papers indexed in the Scopus database for 1887–2018.

General output of teacher education publications

The total publications output includes 24,376 documents. The majority (88.7%) is published in English. The remaining papers are in Spanish (4.5%), Portuguese (2.5%), German (1%), French (0.8%) and 29 other languages (2.5%). Chronologically the annual output of publications has positive dynamics (Fig. 1). The first publications on teacher education were dated 1887. Regular publications in a year started to appear post 1920 till the end of the 1940s, with a low level of annual output (around 20

Disciplinary relevance of teacher education research

Following the idea that every journal represents a group of researchers who consider definite topics of the field, we look into the journals' dissemination over disciplines. We studied subject areas of the journals from the database to elucidate what disciplinary communities contribute the most to the research field. The majority of teacher education papers (91.49%) is published in the journals' category Social Sciences (Table 4). The other significant subject areas, appearing as separate

The conceptual structure of the teacher education research

The conceptual structure of the teacher education research was observed using the most frequent words in publications' titles. Taking into consideration that the extracted documents of the Scopus database did not predominantly include abstracts and keywords before the 2000s, the most frequent terms were analyzed using the papers’ titles only. The other reason for the title analysis is that the title indicates the more precise topic of the research, except for some creative titles. The indicated

Intellectual structure of the teacher education research

The list of the most cited references includes both the fundamental research of sociologists and psychologists dedicated to the learning and teaching processes and representative research cases of teachers’ profiles and teacher education content (Table 5). Regarding the document type, the sources are papers and books, or book chapters. There are no government regulations in the top ten frequently used references list, but the most cited of them are the National Science Education Standards of

Discussion

The results of our study in terms of global communities, intentional collaborations of scholars, and research lines should be considered relatively, as general trends and features of the research field. All this constructs a common picture of the research area. The established citations and publication strategies of teacher education researchers can differ in the nation-based research communities. The stability and significance of the research trends is based on the quantitative data from the

Limitations & future studies

Despite the advantage of obtaining insights from different journals, the selected dataset has limitations. The share of publications from journals in English speaking countries is dominant. This fact affected the results of our study in terms of (co-)authorship, (co-)citation, and topical structure and caused some limitations, particularly missing journals in local languages of non-English speaking countries. We totally accept that the global research field on teacher education goes beyond the

Conclusion

The study represents a reflection of the teacher education research as a separate research field with its constitution, and its features. The analysis of published papers in journals indexed in Scopus enlighten the common visible part of teacher education studies worldwide. This internationally represented part of the field confirms the global dimension of teacher education research. An intensively increasing publication rate in the 21st century and multiple targeted journals on educating

CRediT author statement

Denis Ananin: Term, Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Data Curation, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing, Visualization. Andrey Lovakov: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data Curation, Writing - Review & Editing, Supervision.

Funding

The article was prepared within the framework of the HSE University Basic Research Program.

Acknowledgements

We would also like to show our gratitude to our colleagues of the Center for Institutional Studies (Higher School of Economics, Moscow) who made it possible to conduct this research and gave insightful comments and valuable advices by discussing the results and writing the paper text.

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