Comparative Education ReviewGuide to Searching for World Literature

Abstract

As documented by recent essays discussing the Comparative Education Review’s annual bibliographies (Stambach and Cappy 2012; Easton 2014, 2015), the field of comparative and international education has mushroomed. A simple search for “comparative education” in Google Scholar for 2014–15 produces over 8,000 results. Moreover, comparativists are interested in studies of education from around the world that are not written from a comparative perspective but that are implicitly “comparative” for readers from outside the country described. The latter body of publications on education writ large is vastly larger than works that fall specifically within the field of comparative education, and it is likewise mushrooming. At this point in the history of academic publishing, with encouragement from its advisory board, the CER editorial team is rethinking how best to help its readership stay informed about new publications of relevance to their research. The time is approaching, we think, to move away from trying to list the articles of most relevance (even in a searchable database, as done in the online supplement to this issue). Instead, we may need to assist readers, particularly those entering the field or beginning to explore a new area, in conducting their own searches. This essay is a humble “beta version” of what such a guide to searching might look like. Scholarly production is not only growing rapidly, but also comes from very diverse geographical locations in a variety of languages through varied distribution systems, while representing diverse academic and epistemological bases. Accessing this sprawling and diverse scholarly production may