Erik Nylander

The Transnational Track: State Sponsorship and Singapore's Oxbridge Elite.

This paper explores the process of transnational institutional matching between elite institutions in Singapore and Great Britain, and the role of state-sponsored scholarships in enabling this process as political and administrative elites are selected and groomed. Using data gathered from in-depth interviews conducted with Singaporean undergraduates studying at Oxbridge and a dataset of the institutional origins of 580 Singaporean government scholars, the analysis illustrates how students are being matched from two Singaporean junior colleges to Oxbridge and back to the higher strata of the Singaporean Public Service. We show that the educational trajectories of these government scholars need to be addressed in relation to the informational capital acquired in specific elite schools as well as the governing roles these individuals are meant to obtain within the state upon graduation.

The Anglophone International(e) A Bibliometric Analysis of Three Adult Education Journals, 2005-2012

Research funding, promotions, and career trajectories are currently increasingly dependent on the emerging economy of publications and citations across the globe. Such an economy encourages scholars to publish in international journals that are indexed in databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. These developments place an increased emphasis on the question of who is allowed to publish in the journals listed there and whose research counts as valuable. Based on bibliographic data from articles submitted to three main journals in the field of adult education research between 2005 and 2012, we scrutinize the extent to which the emerging economy of publications and citations is dependent on national and regional boundaries. Our results show how four Anglophone countries dominate the field in relation to both published articles and the share of most cited articles and where the publication pattern of these authors are national and regional rather than international.

Adult Education Research: Publication Strategies and Collegial Recognition

In recent years, researchers throughout the world have come under increased pressure to publish in English, direct their scholarly work to internationally acclaimed journals indexed in the dominating databases (i.e. Scopus and Web of Science) and render their work citable among peers in other countries. In this chapter, we summarize some recent bibliometric studies that have mapped out what kind of research that have been published and cited in three leading journals related to adult––lifelong education and learning––and which researchers that has been given recognition. We argue that the strong political waves of managerial reform have made academic career trajectories and promotions more dependent upon publications and citations, thus necessitating a discussion about the most effective publication strategies for submission. At the same time, we acknowledge the multiple professional demands of adult educational scholars and highlight the ways different definitions of scholarly impact might stand in conflict with one another.