Abstract
The worth of academic knowledge tends to be tested against global metrics of citations and articles published in high-ranking English language academic journals. This paper examines academic knowledge production in three local fields of research with different national languages (English, Finnish and French). It focuses on knowledge production on the topic of apprenticeship where there are distinctive differences in the three local research fields and the associated patterns of academic publication over a 15-year period. The findings suggest that publication patterns are still largely tied to the respective national languages. Concerns are raised about the limited visibility of non-Anglophone local contexts and conceptual frameworks as filtered through global academic knowledge production processes. The language practices in the production of academic knowledge need to be challenged to ensure that knowledge from these sources is not lost in translation or in the re-contextualisation for global audiences.
Highlights
Ideas in the academic community circulate largely through publications (Schriewer and Keiner 1992)
It focuses on knowledge production on the topic of apprenticeship where there are distinctive differences in the three local research fields and the associated patterns of academic publication over a 15-year period
Apprenticeship as a form of initial vocational education is very marginal in Finland and marginal in both England and France
Summary
Ideas in the academic community circulate largely through publications (Schriewer and Keiner 1992). There is evidence of academic journals going to great lengths to jockey for a better position in the global rankings as measured, for example by the journal impact factor (Martin 2016; Times Higher Education 2015). Journal article citation counting systems are used to derive quantifiable measures of the influence or impact of an individual academic and their research. These quantifiable metrics measuring the researcher’s influence and impact on the global scale may be used to determine decisions around funding of research in local settings (Deem, Mok, and Lucas 2008; Lillis and Curry 2010). Researchers are implicated in the race to be considered ‘world-class’ (May 2005) regardless of whether they seek impact for their research primarily in local or in global settings
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