Global Academic Publishing: Policies, Perspectives and Pedagogies 9781783099245

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Global Academic Publishing

STUDIES IN KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND PARTICIPATION Series Editors: Mary Jane Curry, University of Rochester, USA, and Theresa Lillis, The Open University, UK Questions about the relationships among language and other semiotic resources (such as image, film/video, sound) and knowledge production, participation and distribution are increasingly coming to the fore in the context of debates about globalisation, multilingualism, and new technologies. Much of the existing work published on knowledge production has focused on formal academic/scientific knowledge; this knowledge is beginning to be produced and communicated via a much wider range of genres, modes, and media including, for example, blogs, wikis, and Twitter feeds, which have created new ways of producing and communicating knowledge, as well as opening up new ways of participating. Fast-moving shifts in these domains prompt the need for this series which aims to explore facets of knowledge production including: what is counted as knowledge, how it is recognised and rewarded, and who has access to producing, distributing and using knowledge(s). One of the key aims of the series is to include work by scholars located outside the ‘centre’, and to include work written in innovative styles and formats. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. Editorial Board Jannis Androutsopoulos, University of Hamburg, Germany Karen Bennett, Universidade Nova, Portugal Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University, the Netherlands Rebecca Black, University of California, USA Sally Burgess, Universidad de La Laguna, Spain Paula Carlino, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina Christine Casanave, Temple University, USA Christiane Donohue, Dartmouth College, USA Guillaume Gentil, Carleton University, Canada Bruce Horner, University of Louisville, USA Dawang Huang, University of Ningbo, China Luisa Martín Rojo, Universidad Autonoma, Spain Carolyn McKinney, University of Cape Town, South Africa Françoise Salager-Meyer, Universidad de Los Andes, Venezuela Elana Shohamy, Tel Aviv University, Israel Sue Starfield, University of New South Wales, Australia Christine Tardy, Arizona State University, USA Lucia Thesen, University of Cape Town, South Africa

STUDIES IN KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND PARTICIPATION: 1

Global Academic Publishing Policies, Perspectives and Pedagogies

Edited by Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit

DOI 10.21832/CURRY9238 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Names: Curry, Mary Jane., editor. | Lillis, Theresa M., 1956- editor. Title: Global Academic Publishing: Policies, Perspectives and Pedagogies/ Edited by Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis. Description: Bristol, UK; Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Multilingual Matters, [2018] | Series: Studies in Knowledge Production and Participation: 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017028978| ISBN 9781783099238 (hardcover: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781783099221 (softcover: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781783099245 (pdf) | ISBN 9781783099252 (epub) | ISBN 9781783099269 (Kindle) Subjects: LCSH: Academic writing–Study and teaching. | English language– Globalization. | Scholarly publishing–Research. Classification: LCC P301.5.A27 G56 2018 | DDC 070.5/94–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028978 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-923-8 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-922-1 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA. Copyright © 2018 Mary Jane Curry, Theresa Lillis and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services Limited. Printed and bound in the UK by the CPI Books Group Ltd. Printed and bound in the US by Edwards Brothers Malloy, Inc.

In memory of Brian V. Street, whose critical and generous work on literacies has forged a ‘gap in the wall for us to make our way through’*

*

A comment made by Brian Street about what literacies work can achieve. Street, B. (2015) Revisiting the question of transformation in academic literacies. In T. Lillis, K. Harrington, M. Lea and S. Mitchell (eds) Working with Academic Literacies: Case Studies Towards Transformative Practice. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Available at http://wac.colostate.edu/books/lillis.

Contents

Figures

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Tables

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Contributors

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Acknowledgments

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Preface 1

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Problematizing English as the Privileged Language of Global Academic Publishing Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis

1

Part 1: Evaluation Practices Shaping Academic Publishing 2

Lost in Quantification: Scholars and the Politics of Bibliometrics Lynn P. Nygaard and Rocco Bellanova

3

PhD Publication Requirements and Practices: A Multidisciplinary Case Study of a Hungarian University Robin L. Nagano and Edit Bukovszki Spiczéné

4

Chinese Business Schools Pursuing Growth through International Publishing: Evidence from Institutional Genres Yongyan Li and Rui Yang

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23

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Contents

Part 2: Scholars’ Practices and Perspectives 5

Issues of Identity and Voice: Writing English for Research Purposes in the Semi-periphery Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir and Hafdís Ingvarsdóttir

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6

Language Policy and the Disengagement of the International Academic Elite John Harbord

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Publishing in Pursuit of an Academic Career: The Role of Embedded and Encultured Knowledge in National Job-market Entry Strategies of Elite Early Career European Scholars Laurie Anderson

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Part 3: Academic Journal Policies and Practices 8

The Reaction of Scholarly Journals to Impact-factor Publication Requirements in Kazakhstan Aliya Kuzhabekova

9

Blind Peer Review at an English Language Teaching Journal in Taiwan: Glocalized Practices within the Globalization of Higher Education Cheryl Sheridan

10

Publishing from the ELT Periphery: The Profile Journal Experience in Colombia Melba Libia Cárdenas and Isobel Rainey

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The Rise of Multimodality in Academic Publishing Cheryl E. Ball, Andrew Morrison and Douglas Eyman

12 Open Access: The Next Model for Research Dissemination? Françoise Salager-Meyer 13

Reconsidering ‘Predatory’ Open Access Journals in an Age of Globalised English-language Academic Publishing Ismaeil Fazel and Joel Heng Hartse

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Contents

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Part 4: Pedagogies for Global Academic Publishing 14

Teaching Writing for Publication in English to Engineering Students: Implications from a Collaborative Course in Taiwan Ju Chuan Huang

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The Potential and Limitations of an Intensive English for Research Publication Purposes Course for Mexican Scholars James Corcoran

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Emerging Academics: Using WhatsApp to Share Novice and Expert Resources in a Postgraduate Writing Group Soraya Abdulatief and Xolisa Guzula

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Index

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Figures

Figure 11.1 A webtext from JAR on global food practices includes a multimedia splash navigation page

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Figure 11.2 Inside the global food webtext from JAR, word and image are juxtaposed (with linked text) on a horizontal reading plane

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Figure 11.3 Webtexts in Audio-Visual Thinking presented as videos inside a frame of the whole journal

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Figure 11.4 Screenshot (from the August 2015 issue of Kairos, Table of Contents) showing thumbnail designs representative of webtexts all composed in HTML, but with implementations of javascript and (in the above two cases) video

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Figure 11.5 Screenshot from 20th anniversary issue of Kairos, showing the reader toolbar opened to the site-wide navigational and citation options

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Figure 13.1 Beall’s criteria applied to the selected journals in descending order of red flags

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Figure 14.1 The process of collaborative instruction

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Figure 16.1 Academic Propellers using WhatsApp

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Tables

Table 1.1 GERD and share of world publications by global region and income level (selected countries)

5

Table 2.1 NPI points by publication category and level of publication channel

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Table 3.1 Publication points for two genres

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Table 3.2 Criteria for journal quality by doctoral school

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Table 3.3 Number of respondents by doctoral school (2015–2016 academic year)

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Table 3.4 Number of research publications reported for journal articles and conference papers (as a share of publications for the group)

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Table 3.5 Other genres produced by respondents, by doctoral school

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Table 4.1 Thirty documents gathered from 17 Chinese business schools

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Table 4.2 Social facts constructed by CBSs about publishing in international journals

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Table 4.3 Posts of target recruitment at S8, S14 and S16, with age limits

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Table 4.4 Yearly salary scale of different posts at S5 and S16

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Table 5.1 Participants in the second interview phase of the study

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Table 9.1 Participants’ approximate years of earning a PhD and roles with English Teaching and Learning

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Table 10.1 Reasons to publish with Profile, drawn from the survey (S) and interviews (I) 156

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Tables

Table 11.1 Crosswalk between publishing infrastructures and CELJ guidelines

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Table 13.1 Distribution of authors and editorial board members across the analysed journals

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Table 15.1 Weekly content in the ERPP course

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Table 15.2 Participants and data collection methods

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Contributors

Soraya Abdulatief is a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She holds a postgraduate diploma in education from the same university and a master’s degree in English literature from the University of the Western Cape. Before her return to postgraduate studies, she was an online editor and technical writer. She has lectured in English communications at a university of technology. Her PhD research is on teaching critical and academic literacy practices to higher education students. Additional research interests include multiliteracies, multimodality, technology in education and debates around language, race and gender. Laurie Anderson is professor of English language and linguistics at the University of Siena, Italy. Her current research engages critically with issues related to the use of English as a lingua franca in migratory settings, with particular reference to the multilingual practices of international scholars and to links between publishing and early career mobility. She collaborates with the Max Weber Post-doctoral Programme at the European University Institute (Florence) and is a founding member of the FIESOLE Group, a network of applied linguists from various European institutions dedicated to developing reflexive, transnational approaches to training for academic practice. Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir is professor of second language studies in the Department of Foreign Language, Literature and Linguistics, School of Humanities, University of Iceland. Birna is on the board of the Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Institute for Foreign Languages. Her research interests include English as a lingua franca, language contact and multilingualism and Computer Assisted Language Learning. She currently directs an Icelandic Research Centre-funded study examining the status of English as an additional language in Iceland with special reference to education. She is also the project director of www.icelandiconline.com.

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Contributors

Cheryl E. Ball is associate professor of digital publishing studies and director of the Digital Publishing Institute at West Virginia University, United States. Ball serves as the executive director of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and has been editor of Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy since 2006. Her recent research in editorial workflows and digital publishing infrastructures can be found in multiple journals and edited collections, as well as on her personal repository, http://ceball.com. Her most recent publishing work, with Andrew Morrison, is building an open-access multimedia academic publishing platform, Vega – funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Rocco Bellanova is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and visiting lecturer at the Université Saint-Louis–Bruxelles. His research focuses on digital data as pivotal elements in the governing of societies. He carries out research on mass surveillance, security technologies and data protection. He worked on his book chapter while a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. He has co-edited the book Surveillance, Privacy and Security: Citizens’ Perspectives (Routledge, 2017). Melba L. Cárdenas is an associate professor of the Foreign Languages Department at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá campus, and belongs to the LEXI (Lenguas Extranjeras e Investigación) and PROFILE (Profesores de Inglés como Lengua Extranjera) research groups. She holds an MA in TESOL (Edinburgh University) and is a PhD candidate in education (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain), thanks to a scholarship granted by Fundación Carolina. She is the editor of the HOW and PROFILE journals, published in Colombia. She has investigated and published in the areas of initial and in-service teacher education, action research, ELT, evaluation and classroom research. James Corcoran is a research officer at New College, University of Toronto, an English for Academic Purposes instructor at Glendon College, York University, and a language teacher educator at the University of Western Ontario and OISE, University of Toronto, Canada. Publications stemming from his doctoral research into Latin American scholars’ experiences with writing for publication include an article in a special issue (PRISEAL) of Publications (Corcoran & Englander, 2016); a book on the potential of critical approaches to writing for publication pedagogy (Englander & Corcoran, forthcoming); and an edited volume on global writing for publication pedagogies (Corcoran, Englander and Muresan, forthcoming). Douglas Eyman teaches courses in digital rhetoric and professional writing at George Mason University, United States, where he directs the PhD in Writing and Rhetoric. Douglas is senior editor and publisher of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, an online journal that has

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been publishing peer-reviewed scholarship on computers and writing since 1996. In addition to Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice (University of Michigan Press, 2015), Eyman’s scholarly work has appeared in Computers and Composition, Pedagogy, and Technical Communication; he is also co-editor of Play/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writing, Games (Eyman & Davis, Parlor Press, 2016). Ismaeil Fazel is a PhD candidate in TESL at the Department of Language and Literacy Education of the University of British Columbia, Canada. He has also earned a sub-specialization in measurement, evaluation and research methodology from the University of British Columbia. His main research interests are graduate-level academic writing, academic discourse socialization, identity and investment, and language assessment. He has published in journals such as English for Academic Purposes, TESL Canada and the Reading Matrix. Xolisa Guzula is an early literacy specialist with interest in biliteracy development, emergent literacy, bi/multilingual education, language and literacy as social practice, multiliteracies, multimodality, third spaces and bilingual children’s literature. She has experience in early literacy and biliteracy teacher training and community literacy training. She is a storyteller, author and translator of children’s literature and develops bilingual teacher professional materials. She is a co-founder of a network of community reading and writing clubs emerging across South Africa and currently a full-time doctoral student researching bilingual children’s translanguaging and multiliteracies practices. John Harbord is academic writing advisor at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has previously worked extensively as a writing teacher, teacher trainer, writing center director, writing-across-the-curriculum advisor and academic consultant for various institutions in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. His research interests are related to education policy, and to multilingualism and plagiarism policy in particular. Joel Heng Hartse is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is co-author of Perspectives on Teaching English at Colleges and Universities in China in the ELT in Context Series (TESOL Press) and his work has appeared in the Journal of Second Language Writing, Asian Englishes, Composition Studies and English Today. He is co-editor of the Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie. Ju Chuan Huang is an assistant professor in the Institute of Applied English at National Taiwan Ocean University. She received her PhD in Learning and Instruction at State University of New York at Buffalo. She is interested in

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Contributors

English for specific/academic purposes, with a focus on writing for scholarly publication. Her articles have appeared in several prestigious journals, such as Journal of English for Academic Purposes and System. Hafdís Ingvarsdóttir is professor of language education at the University of Iceland. She began her career as a secondary school teacher and has been involved in teacher education for many years. For a number of years, she led the teacher education program at the University of Iceland. Her main areas of inquiry are teacher education and teacher growth (teacher cognition) with special emphasis on foreign language teaching. Currently, she is engaged in two main research projects: a nationwide project on the status and use of English in Iceland and a project investigating pedagogical practices in upper-secondary schools. Aliya Kuzhabekova is assistant professor at the Graduate School of Education, Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. She obtained her PhD in Higher Education Policy and Administration from the University of Minnesota. Subsequently, she worked as a post-doc at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Aliya uses a mix of methods, including bibliometric approaches, to explore local and international faculty experiences in contemporary academe, paying special attention to faculty research capacity and the specific experiences of females. She also conducts research on language policy and academic publishing in Kazakhstan. Yongyan Li is an associate professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, China. Her scholarship focuses mainly on English as an additional language scholars writing for international publication and English as a second language students writing in academic disciplines. She has published in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Journal of Second Language Writing and Science and Engineering Ethics. Andrew Morrison is director of the Centre for Design Research (www. designresearch.no) at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway. His research covers multiliteracies, research mediation, transdisciplinary design and doctoral design education. Collaborative research is central to Andrew’s work on the network city, future cultural landscapes of the Arctic and communication design between products, services interactions and systems design. His recent publications span speculative inquiry, design fiction, design and additive manufacturing, doctoral design pedagogies and genre innovation. Concerning design and futures literacies, Andrew is on the organizing committee of Anticipation 2017 conference and co-chair of Nordes 2017 (www.nordes.org). Robin Lee Nagano teaches English, including English for specific and academic purposes at the University of Miskolc, Hungary. Previously, she spent

Contributors

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a decade and a half working in Japan. She enjoys learning about how language is used in different disciplines, from engineering to economics. She holds a master’s degree in applied linguistics and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree. Her research interests are in language for specific purposes, English for academic purposes and English for research publication purposes. Lynn P. Nygaard is a special adviser at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway, focusing on helping researchers publish academically, secure grants and develop as professionals. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Education, University College London. As a practitioner, Nygaard is the author of Writing for Scholars: A Practical Guide to Making Sense and Being Heard (Sage, 2015), and holds workshops for academic writers throughout Norway. As a researcher, she uses ethnographic methods and bibliometric analyses to better understand the different contexts of academic writing and wide variety of publishing practices. Isobel Rainey worked for many years as a lecturer in applied linguistics: as an English language teaching consultant, teacher and teacher educator in Europe, the Middle and Far East and South America. She is author of several EFL textbooks series, and articles and chapters in books on TESOL topics. Her research interests include the realities and beliefs of grassroots secondary school teachers of EFL. Before retiring, she was a lecturer in applied linguistics: TESOL at the University of Surrey, United Kingdom. In retirement, she coordinates ESOL projects for asylum seekers and refugees and works as a freelance consultant for teacher development and action research programs. Françoise Salager-Meyer was educated at the University of Lyons, France, and the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of numerous publications on written medical discourse, mostly from a diachronic, cross-linguistic and cross-generic perspective. In 1994 and 2004, she was awarded the Horowitz Prize for her works on the pragmatics of written scholarly communication. She was the editor of the Language and Medicine section of the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edn, Elsevier) and is currently coordinating the Multilingual and Multidisciplinary Research Group on Scientific Discourse Analysis, Graduate School of Medicine, University of the Andes, Mérida, Venezuela. Cheryl L. Sheridan is a lecturer at the Foreign Language Center of National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan, and a doctoral candidate in the Composition and TESOL program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, United States. She published ‘National journals and centering institutions: A historiography of an English language teaching journal in Taiwan’ in English for Specific Purposes in 2015. Her research focuses on multilingual scholars’

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scholarly publishing experiences, especially with English-medium ‘national’ journals in non-Anglophone, non-center contexts. Edit Spiczéné Bukovszki has been working at the University of Miskolc, Hungary, as a teacher of English for more than a decade, teaching general English and English for specific purposes (ESP) courses for students of engineering, law and economics. Currently, she is doing her PhD at Eszterházy Károly College in Education Sciences. Her main research topics are facilitating autonomous learning and teaching ESP in a higher education context, innovative teaching methods and English-medium instruction. Rui Yang is professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. With over two and a half decades of academic career in China, Australia and Hong Kong, he has an impressive record of research at the interface of Chinese and Western traditions in education. He has established his reputation among scholars in English and Chinese languages in the fields of comparative and international education and Chinese higher education. His research interests include education policy sociology, comparative and cross-cultural studies in education, international higher education, educational development in Chinese societies and international politics in educational research.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the assistance of the University of Rochester librarians Kathy McGowan and Eileen Daly-Boas as well as PhD students Ibrahim Fidan, Mahmoud Altalouli and Cigdem Fidan in preparing this book. Thanks to Clare Zuraw for compiling the index.

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This edited volume marks the introduction of our series: Studies in Knowledge Production and Participation. Its overarching goal is to contribute to current debates about the roles of globalisation, multilingualism and new technologies in relation to knowledge production. Existing scholarship on knowledge production has mainly concentrated on academic knowledge traditionally disseminated through journals and books, with concerns being raised about unequal access to the global publishing marketplace in terms of both the production and the use of knowledge. Such scholarship has predominantly been conducted and written about by researchers located in well-resourced, often Anglophone contexts. The series has three key aims: (1) To broaden the range of research on knowledge production and access by covering topics such as the effects of the policies and practices of evaluation and the provision of resources; responses and resistance to pressures for the production of certain types of knowledge; various modes and technologies of knowledge production and participation; and different types of vernacular knowledge-making practices. (2) To include work by scholars located in parts of the world outside of the AngloAmerican ‘centre’, whether their research focuses on their local context or elsewhere. Such contributions might explore the ways in which local languages are used (or displaced by English) in different types of knowledge construction. (3) To include work from a range of academic fields, including but not limited to applied linguistics, education, writing/literacies (including digital and multimodal), media studies and policy. Researchers in these fields use a variety of methodologies, from qualitative and ethnographic methods to systemic functional and text linguistics to corpus linguistics, and survey research.

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1 Problematizing English as the Privileged Language of Global Academic Publishing Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis

In recent decades, English has been much heralded as the dominant language of global academic journal publishing, with estimates putting the prevalence of English use in academic journals at between 75% and 90%, depending on the discipline (see for example, Deng, 2015; van Weijen, 2012). In the context of global academic knowledge production, English is sometimes viewed positively as a lingua franca that facilitates the spread of ideas; in this vein, it is seen as replacing earlier linguae francae such as Latin and German (Sano, 2002). The rise of English in academic publishing parallels its reach across many academic domains in the present era of globalization, with English playing a key role in other trends such as the global mobility of students and scholars and as the medium of instruction in educational contexts outside of historically Anglophone ‘center’ nation states (Brock-Utne, 2007; Wallerstein, 1991). For scholars around the world, including in contexts where English is not the daily medium of communication, publishing in English can bring both benefits and detriments. In the increasing number of contexts where academic knowledge production has become commodified, publishing in English can yield prestige and material rewards (Lillis & Curry, 2010). It also enables many scholars to realize their interest in participating in international exchanges of ideas and research, with the desire for a shared intellectual language echoing utopian ideals about the free flow of knowledge (Ondari-Okemwa, 2007). In contrast, not publishing in English can carry negative consequences for certain scholars, such as being passed over for promotion, being denied salary increases or not being considered eligible to supervise doctoral students or to receive research funding (e.g. Queiroz de Barros, 2014). In many locations, therefore, multilingual scholars no longer face a decision about whether to publish in English; rather, their decisions focus on how to include English-medium publishing within their complex publishing agendas, which may include commitments to local knowledge production (Curry & Lillis, 2004, 2013a). This commitment typically requires additional time and other resources (Lillis & Curry, 2010). 1

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Postgraduate students also increasingly face requirements to publish (in English) to earn their degrees, an aspect of the larger pressure to have published before entering the job market (e.g. see Huang, 2014). For many multilingual scholars and students, therefore, publishing in English has become an imperative (e.g. Ge, 2015; Graham, 2015; Lee & Lee, 2013), even while considerable academic publishing continues to be carried out in other languages. As our research has shown (e.g. Curry & Lillis, 2013a, 2014; Lillis & Curry, 2010, 2015), many dimensions of the social practices of writing for publication need to be considered in understanding how scholars engage with the growing pressures for publishing in English. One important dimension is scholars’ commitment to, and interests in, publishing in local languages for local audiences and therefore sustaining local research and other communities (Curry & Lillis, 2004). Another key dimension is multilingual scholars’ uneven access to the material and discursive resources that support English-medium academic publishing (Lillis & Curry, 2006a, 2013a). A related, overarching dimension entails how these problematics are addressed in institutional and governmental policies related to academic publishing and the rewards available for different types of publications (Curry & Lillis, 2013b).

Evaluation Regimes and the Role of English Publications output has become an important aspect of the evaluation of individual scholars as well as the rankings of institutions on national, regional and global scales (Blommaert et al., 2005). The governmental and institutional policies that frame the evaluation of scholars’ work increasingly involve bibliometric measures such as the rankings of journals included in particular indexes and the journal impact factor (IF),1 which inherently promote or require the use of English (Feng et al., 2013; Lillis & Curry, 2010). Originating in the United States, the Web of Science (WoS) is a journal analysis service, owned by multinational corporation Thomson Reuters, that creates high-status citation indexes, publishes the influential Journal Citation Reports and keeps a ‘Master Journal List’ of the journals it draws on to create its products (www.wokinfo.com). WoS indexes overwhelmingly include journals that use some or all English (Lillis & Curry, 2013). In fact, despite the considerable research published in other languages, English-only journals predominate in the WoS indexes: currently, 87% of Science Citation Index (SCI) journals, 88% of Social Science Citation Indexes (SSCI) journals and 65% of Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) journals are English medium.2 English therefore plays a central role in the construction of the bibliometrics increasingly being used to evaluate the knowledge production activities of those working in higher education (Bardi & Muresan, 2014).Indeed, in response to pressures for greater accountability in higher education around the world, there has been

Problematizing English as the Privileged Language of Global Academic Publishing

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a rise in the development and use of codified ‘evaluation regimes’ (Lillis, 2013), which increasingly use metrics of academic output. Such regimes instantiate the larger context of the ‘knowledge economy’, providing the frame for viewing academic publications as a measurable commodity, one that affects not only individual scholars’ careers but also the broader ability of a nation state or region to generate knowledge, generally seen to be a boon to economic activity (e.g. Englander & Uzuner Smith, 2013; Lillis & Curry, 2013: 220). Academic knowledge production in the form of research articles and patents is credited with supporting industrial innovations (Leydesdorff & Wagner, 2009) and economic development more broadly. In higher education, metrics of knowledge production also factor significantly in global rankings of universities (Hazelkorn, 2014: 23). For example, Shanghai Jiao Tong University uses six ‘objective criteria’ by which to evaluate universities for inclusion in its prestigious list, including [the] number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Reuters, number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance of a university. (http://www.shanghairanking.com) Similarly, ‘research’ and ‘citations’ factor as key criteria for the Times Higher Education World Universities Ranking (https://www.timeshighereducation. com/world-university-rankings/2016/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25). Journal publications (and the related IF, citations, etc.) are the key type of academic knowledge production counted in such ranking systems. Evaluation and reward structures across geolinguistic contexts and academic disciplines involve both official policies and uncodified practices (Bardi & Muresan, 2014; Curry & Lillis, 2014; Lillis & Curry 2010). Around the world, evaluation criteria have been articulated in increasingly finegrained ways, moving toward bibliometrics that involve English. Whereas, for example, scholars in Hungary were previously awarded more points for publishing in ‘foreign’ journals (including those using French and German) than in journals using Hungarian (Lillis & Curry, 2010), many evaluation regimes now specify publishing in journals included in the WoS indexes. Further, these regimes often assign value to a journal’s ranking in indexes or its IF (e.g. Lee & Lee, 2013). As only journals included in the WoS citation indexes are included in the official IF, using a journal’s IF as an evaluation criterion restricts the range of publication outlets that are institutionally rewarded. As a result, as competition grows to publish in these journals, journals that are excluded from WoS indexes – particularly those using languages other than English – become neglected. Overall, therefore, English is implicated in multiple aspects of the evaluation regimes for academic work within the global knowledge economy. As a result, the

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strong focus in governmental and institutional evaluation systems on the production of research articles – particularly English-medium articles published in journals that are included in prestigious indexes – shapes academic knowledge production in significant ways (Canagarajah, 2002; Lillis & Curry, 2010, 2015). Ultimately, the topic of academic publishing in English has serious implications for equity in global knowledge production.

Global Research Investment and Academic Productivity Scholars’ working conditions clearly affect their ability to contend with pressures to publish in high-status English-medium journals. However, research and policy discussions of academic evaluation regimes and policies related to knowledge production have generally neglected the central role of investment in research needed for institutions to provide the considerable material resources that scholars working in well-resourced contexts take for granted. The material and discursive resources required to conduct and publish research include funding for research activity; bibliographic resources, including books, journals and databases (Canagarajah, 1996, 2002); time; staff; supplies; (English-medium) text production support (Flowerdew, 2001; Lillis & Curry, 2006a, 2010); and travel to scholarly conferences where academic research networks can be forged and sustained (Curry & Lillis, 2010, 2013a). In many locations, these resources mainly come from government investment, although the source of such investment (government, business) and the extent of investment vary considerably across regions of the world. Table 1.1 lists general expenditure on research and development (GERD) as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) for selected top research-producing countries and regions of the world, as well as the share of global research publications of these countries in sciences and social sciences.As Table 1.1 shows, a few countries and regions produce the majority of research publications: Europe, the United States and, increasingly, high-income Asian countries – mainly China and Japan. Research investment directly affects the economic and material conditions in which scholars are able to undertake and then write about research. In recent years, for example, China has increased both its research investment and its global share of article publications, with GERD growing from 1.44% in 2007 to 2.1% in 2015 and its share of science articles growing from 7.4% to 18.2% in the same period. While other factors have clearly contributed to the increase in the case of China, the importance of research investment is clear, both in immediate material terms for researchers themselves and for their institutions and governments in being able to claim a higher share of global (English-medium) publications.

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Table 1.1 GERD and share of world publications by global region and income level (selected countries) Share (%) of science publications (2013; fractional counting of articles, selected conference proceedings and books)**

Share of social science articles (2013; fractional counting, based on SCOPUS)****

2.8 (2013) 1.6 (2014)

18.8 2.6

35.6 4.3

3.2 (2015) 3.2 (2015) 3.0 (2012) 3.0 (2015) 3.0 (2015) 2.8 (2015) 2.5 (2015) 2.2 (2015) 2.0 (2015) 2.0 (2015) 1.7 (2015) 1.7 (2015) 1.5 (2015) 1.4 (2015) 1.3 (2015) 1.3 (2015) 1.2 (2015) 1.0 (2015) 0.9 (2015) 0.9 (2015)

0.5 0.9 1.0 0.6 0.5 4.6 0.8 3.3 1.4 0.6 4.4 0.4 0.3 0.3 0.6 3.0 2.4 1.3 0.5 0.2

0.8 1.1 0.9 0.6 0.5 4.4 1.0 3.1 2.4 0.4 9.9 0.8 0.5 0.3 0.5 2.0 2.9 0.4 0.6 0.2

1.1 (2015) 1.0 (2015) 0.5 (2015)

1.6 1.4 0.5

0.3 1.3 0.5

4.3 (2015) 3.6 (2015)

2.7 4.7

0.8 1.3 Continued

Region/country/income GERD as % of GDP* classification (World Bank)

North America High income United States Canada Europe/Central Asia High income Finland Sweden Switzerland Denmark Austria Germany Belgium France Netherlands Czech Republic United Kingdom Norway Ireland Hungary Portugal Italy Spain Poland Greece Slovak Republic Upper middle income Russian Federation Turkey Romania East Asia/South Asia High income South Korea Japan

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Table 1.1 Continued Region/country/income GERD as % of GDP* classification (World Bank)

Taiwan Singapore Lower middle income China India Africa Upper middle income South Africa Lower middle income Egypt Middle East High income Israel Latin America High income Chile Upper middle income Brazil Argentina Mexico Oceania Australia New Zealand

Share (%) of science publications (2013; fractional counting of articles, selected conference proceedings and books)**

3.0 (2013)*** 2.0 (2015)

1.6 0.5

Share of social science articles (2013; fractional counting, based on SCOPUS)**** 1.4***** 0.5

2.1 (2015) 0.9 (2015)

18.2 4.2

5.6 1.3

0.7 (2014)

0.4

0.8

0.7 (2013)

0.4

0.1

4.1 (2014)

0.5

0.9

0.4 (2014)

0.20

0.4

1.2 (2013) 0.6 (2013) 0.5 (2014)

2.2 0.4 0.6

1.4 0.3 0.4

2.1 (2014) 1.7 (2013)

2.2 0.3

4.2 0.8

Notes: This table is an updated version of Table 10.1 in Lillis and Curry (2013). Asterisks indicate data source(s). An asterisk in a column heading indicates that most of the data come from that source. Income groupings are used according to World Bank (2016) classifications: high income=US$12,476+; upper-middle income=US$4,036–US$12,475; lower-middle income=US$1,026–US$4,035; low income=US$1,025 or less. *Compiled from UNESCO Science Report (2015); OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard (2015). **UNESCO Science Report (2015). ***National Science Foundation (2016). ****UNESCO World Social Science Report (2016). *****Gupta and Kumbar (2014: 33).

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Challenges to the Presumed Dominance of English in Academic Publishing While what might be described as the centripetal pull (Bakhtin, 1981) of English-medium journal publishing seems secure, it is not uncontested. When attention is paid to multilingual scholars’ practices and experiences on the ground, a complex picture emerges of their pressures, challenges and responses (Bennett, 2014; Curry & Lillis, 2013b, 2014; Gentil & Séror, 2014; Hanauer & Englander, 2013; Lillis & Curry, 2010; Pho & Tran, 2016). Centrifugal challenges to the centripetal pull have arisen on multiple scales: responses from individual scholars, collective action by groups of scholars in specific contexts working to resist evaluation regimes, the development of English-medium journals outside of Anglophone contexts, the open access movement and the rise of alternative indexes. Concerns likewise are growing about the effects of the dominance of English on the sustainability of local knowledge as well as knowledge that has not historically been privileged within Anglophone traditions (e.g. Brock-Utne, 2007; Ishikawa, 2014). In the past 20 years, the effects of the pressure to produce high status English-medium publications on scholars and their work lives have been well documented, with research consistently showing that such scholars identify the additional expenditures of time, energy, effort and resources required (e.g. Anderson, 2013; Bennett, 2014; Hanauer & Englander, 2011, 2013; for an overview, see Lillis & Curry, 2016). Depending on conditions and circumstances, scholars respond to pressures for English-medium publishing in various ways. At some moments, they adopt strategies aligned with official pressures for English-medium publication, while at other times they employ tactics that resist or subvert the pressure (Curry & Lillis, 2014). These tactics support scholars’ interests in developing local research cultures and local practice and reaching multiple audiences by, for example, engaging in ‘equivalent publishing’, that is, selectively writing for publication in two languages (Lillis & Curry, 2010). Multilingual scholars have also taken collective action to resist the hegemony of English-medium publishing in their geolinguistic contexts. For example, almost 3000 social scientists in Taiwan signed a petition protesting the dominance of the SCI and SSCI in the government’s evaluation regimes (Min, 2014). Another perhaps less obviously noted challenge to the centripetal pull of publishing in center-based English-medium journals comes in the production of English-medium journals in global regions where English is not an official or widely used language. The growing phenomenon of English-medium journals circulating outside of Anglophone contexts can be construed as evidence of the dominance of English (and of the ‘center’)

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in academic knowledge production. It indexes the desire of scholars in smaller geolinguistic locations to reach broader audiences as well as to meet evaluation criteria. However, it is important to note that English is also a semiotic resource that is increasingly used around the world and therefore (potentially) available to use as people desire, untethered to traditionally ‘Anglophone’ locations. In the process of use, and in the context of academic writing, scholars are both transforming the resource itself and the purposes for which it is being used (see Lillis, 2012b). Research on the growing number of English-medium journals has explored the experiences, practices and attitudes of journal editors and reviewers as they engage with centerbased practices and formulate approaches for producing their journals their own contexts (Delgado, 2014; Flowerdew, 2001; Kaplan & Baldauf, 2005; Lillis, 2012a; Petrić, 2014; Sheridan, 2015). With much greater fanfare, the open access movement has posed another challenge to the dominance of for-profit publishing companies based in Anglophone or northern European contexts, focusing on the ways in which academic knowledge has become increasingly commercialized and restricted (Salager-Meyer, 2008, 2012; Ware, 2006). At the same time, pressures for English-medium publishing have resulted in some open access journals engaging in ‘predatory’ practices (Beall, 20163), taking advantage of some scholars’ feelings of desperation in the face of these pressures. The early 2017 removal from the Internet of the List of Predatory Open Access Publishers that Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of ColoradoDenver, had maintained since 2008 signals the stakes involved here; although reasons for the removal of the list have not been made public, suggestions have been made that Beall was threatened with legal action by these publishers (Retraction Watch, 2017). Criticism of the role of high-status journal and citation indexes and the ways that English is nested in them has been growing (Lillis & Curry, 2013; Monjeau et al., 2013). Challenges are being mounted to the dominance of WoS indexes in evaluation systems. In the past 20 years, indexes such as SCIELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) and SCIMAGO Journal and Country Rank have been developed in response to critiques of how journals are ranked and the drawbacks of the IF. SCIELO is a non-profit cooperative launched in 1998 to provide open access for Latin American journals, most of which are excluded from Web of Knowledge indexes. SCIELO also offers access to research that institutional or national libraries may not be able to afford (scielo.org). Launched in 2007, SCIMAGO is an evaluation system based on journals included since 1996 in SCOPUS, an Elsevier database of 20,000-plus journals (http://www.scimagojr.com/ aboutus.php). While at the moment these newer indexes may carry less prestige than those in the Web of Knowledge, in some contexts they are gaining influence and offering an alternative to English-dominated indexes.

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All of these challenges lead centrally to the question of how multilingual scholars can participate more equally in global academic knowledge production. A common response to this question takes the form of normative pedagogical proposals; that is, given the presumed dominance of English, how we can help scholars (and postgraduate students) learn to produce English-medium publications, whether through workshops, courses or manuals. While such support is of interest to many, regardless of their linguistic background or geolinguistic location, a predominant focus on pedagogies to improve scholars’ English proficiency or understanding of the dominant rhetorical and linguistic conventions of research articles (e.g. chapters in Burgess & Martín-Martín, 2008; Lorés-Sanz et al., 2010) can sidestep larger issues of participation in global knowledge production. Even if textual support for publishing in English were to be sufficient in all global locations, once multilingual scholars participate in the journal review process, the existence of some bias against them is clear (Lillis & Curry, 2015; Min, 2014). This bias often appears to be triggered by uses of English in the text that are (mis)recognized as ‘non-native’ or ‘non-standard’, as well as by mentions of non-Anglophone locations of research and other aspects of submitted texts including the use of research methodologies and theories that are out of favor in center contexts (Lillis & Curry, 2010, 2015). The space of global academic publishing therefore remains contested, despite the power of considerable external drivers reinforcing the centripetal pull of Anglophone center journal publishing. Research exploring the social practices and politics of academic publishing – and how scholars are negotiating the tensions playing out across institutions, policies and practices – continues to be needed. At the same time, we argue that pedagogies developed for supporting multilingual scholars and postgraduate students should seek both to make visible dominant Anglophone center writing conventions (e.g. chapters in Cargill & Burgess, 2017; Feak & Swales, 2009, 2011; Swales & Feak, 2000) and to draw on research findings to design approaches that enable scholars to consider their own commitments and interests and respond to external pressures in publishing (e.g. Curry & Lillis, 2010b, 2013a).

Structure, Themes and Parts of This Book The research literature on global academic publishing in the past two decades has grown, but in strongly uneven ways in geolinguistic terms; attention still also needs to be paid to contexts where pressures to publish in English are increasing, including Eurasia, Latin America and Africa. Research is needed to extend current understandings of the development and effects of evaluation policies; the perspectives of key participants in academic publication – authors, editors and reviewers – as they navigate increasingly complex publishing landscapes; and pedagogical initiatives

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that sustain and support scholars’ publishing interests and endeavors. This volume aims to make contributions in all of these areas: It includes chapters representing a wide a range of geolinguistic contexts and types of research participants. While many chapters focus on the situation in a single country (China, Colombia, Hungary, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Norway, Romania, Taiwan, South Africa),4 some take a regional focus (e.g. Europe), some consider particular phenomena such as open access and multimodality in academic publishing and many chapters signal the impact of global evaluation regimes. With no indications that pressures on multilingual scholars to publish in (high-status) English-medium ‘indexed’ journals will abate, it remains important to shed light on the nuances of how pressures are codified and rewarded, how scholars experience and respond to these pressures and how scholars can find support in achieving their goals – from others and themselves. The book opens with the first part focusing on how evaluation regimes shape publishing policy and practices in specific contexts (Norway, Hungary and China) as well as how an increasingly used platform – Google Scholar – is being used to generate data works (in contrast to countrybased evaluation systems or proprietary indexes). These studies, based in different locations, exemplify the workings of national and global evaluation systems and provide links to understanding how such systems function transnationally. In Chapter 2, Lynn Nygaard and Rocco Bellanova challenge the apparent neutrality of the metrics frequently used in the evaluation of research activity by scrutinizing the development of two quite different bibliometric measures – Google Scholar and the Norwegian Publication Indicator. They explore the ‘design dilemmas’ involved in determining what gets counted as research products and how; definitions of journals, publications (genres), (co-)authorship, citations – all of these play a role in ultimate determinations of productivity and therefore of status, rank and reward. In this way, these authors call into question whether the introduction of indicators meant to be innovative actually changes the dynamics of research evaluation or ‘challenge[s] the underlying notions of impact, quality, and productivity which give primacy to the natural sciences and English-language publications’. Turning to examine how policy changes in relation to publishing affect the writing and publishing practices of PhD students in Hungary, in Chapter 3, Robin Nagano and Edit Spiczéné present early findings from a mixed-method study (qualitative interviews informing the survey whose results are reported here, setting the stage for future qualitative work). They investigate how PhD students across seven doctoral schools at one regional Hungarian university work to meet the varying requirements of their programs in terms of the type and language of their publications. This look at how the pressure to publish during the PhD stages is manifested in a context where resources are limited also illuminates where students tend to find support during different phases of the research process (including

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publication), from research and writing support from PhD supervisors to peer support. Their survey results show these two sources of support as dominant, with PhD students making little use of other types of ‘literacy brokers’ (Lillis & Curry, 2006b). Their methodological approach underscores the need for careful empirical work that takes a longitudinal perspective on academic publishing, here tracing how PhD students engage with publishing during the phases of their programs. Requirements for publication – in this case, those that have already been achieved – form the centerpiece of Yongyan Li and Rui Cheng’s investigation in Chapter 4 of the varying genres used by 17 Chinese business schools to recruit faculty members in pursuit of ‘growth through international publication’. Li and Cheng take an innovative methodological approach by analyzing the discourse of the institutional documents used in this effort, most prominently job advertisements. They use ‘an activity-oriented rhetorical genre theory perspective with a critical edge’ to unveil the ideologies or ‘social facts’ underpinning these business schools’ efforts to attract highly successful scholars – both Chinese scholars and scholars from other countries. This effort is made to spur the development of these business schools with an eye to rising in the global rankings of universities. Li and Chen argue that because business schools tend to be the academic departments at the forefront of such efforts, they provide a useful case study. The social facts the authors identify include a dominant ideology of ‘international’ publishing as a key criterion for hiring, with ‘international’ being implicitly associated with high quality and status – and an explicit expectation in some cases that such international productivity continue after hiring. Another important social fact of the hiring process is the privileging of applicants’ doctoral preparation in prestigious ‘overseas’ (non-Chinese universities), or, for Chinese candidates, experience working overseas. Further, an unabashed articulation of age limits for these positions (contrary to Chinese employment law) asserts the ideology that younger academics would be more likely to achieve the desired ‘international’ publications. Li and Cheng note that the codification of these social facts perpetuates institutional and social inequities by privileging certain kinds of job applicants, which ‘effectively bifurcates the academic profession into a younger tier of (often overseas-educated) academics, who are expected to publish in English and have little incentive to publish in Chinese; and an older tier of academics, who only publish in Chinese’. By touching on related aspects of evaluation and reward regimes in different contexts, this part illuminates how the pressures for high-status English-medium publishing affect, in quite distinct ways, the academic profession and those who participate in it. The book’s second part centers on a theme evident across much of the book, the perspectives and practices of multilingual scholars. The three chapters, by Arnsbjörnsdóttir and Ingvarsdóttir, Harbord and Anderson, use interview, survey and ethnographic data to explore the different and

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specific ways in which scholars are negotiating the pressure to publish in general and, more specifically, the pressure to publish in English. All three pay close attention to the significance to scholars of their specific contexts of production, geolinguistic histories and disciplinary interests. Chapter 5, by Birna Arnsbjörnsdóttir and Hafdis Ingvarsdóttir, documents the experiences of Icelandic scholars, foregrounding the ‘hidden challenges’ that they face. They argue that the key challenge is not so much one of competence in English (as many scholars are highly proficient in English) but rather of meaning, knowledge making and voice. And voice, they signal, is as much about uptake as production (Blommaert, 2005; Lillis & Curry, 2015): ‘Developing a voice in academic writing may be hampered not only by lack of facility with English, but also by the tensions and trepidations felt by scientists writing for an international audience in a language they see as distant from their ways of thinking and that excludes access to the local community affected by the research results’. This issue of directionalities of knowledge production, exchange and use is also taken up in Chapter 6 by John Harbord’s report on research focusing on multilingual scholars working in a US-accredited university in Europe. Harbord explores the nature and impact of policy on multilingual scholars’ practices, with policy understood here ‘in its broadest sense – the creation and implementation of rules and guidelines about how things should be done’. He argues that academics need to see policy as something they should not simply react to but actively engage with and drive. Drawing on survey and interview data to illustrate scholars’ publishing decisions and career trajectories, often across national boundaries, Harbord shows the many ways in which they are discouraged from ‘local-language publishing’ and emphasizes a potential consequent disengagement by scholars from local/national/community interests and policy making. He argues that it is crucial to ‘prevent a split between the international global academic elite and local national communities’ and that scholars using multiple languages have a crucial role to play not only in sustaining local knowledge making (echoing Bennett’s [2014] work on ‘epistemicide’) but also in ensuring strong connections between academic knowledge and societal needs. In Chapter 7, Laurie Anderson likewise draws on the notion of an ‘elite’ academic workforce to explore the publishing and career trajectories of a group of early career researchers. Using ethnographic data to explore scholars’ practices and experiences and the notions of historical time and place, career stage and concepts of agency, she raises questions about the reality of free movement of labor, including the mobile academic (in areas such as the European Higher Education Area) for even those in relatively privileged positions. Rather, Anderson emphasizes the specificity of local national job markets and explores the different kind of knowledges needed in order to access and take part in such markets. Anderson does this by tracking the understandings of four scholars from different national contexts, but from the same academic discipline, about one specific job market (France) and

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‘the role these understandings played in their publishing decisions’ and, ultimately, their career trajectories. Her chapter underlines the importance of taking a long view of scholars’ practices in order to understand the nature and consequences of decisions made. The third part of the book focuses on academic journal publishing, exploring the economic, scholarly and semiotic imperatives driving changes in practices. The first two chapters in Part 3 consider the phenomenon of journal publishing in contexts – Kazakhstan and Taiwan – where English is not the dominant or main medium of communication but where the fact of ‘English’ being nested within global evaluation regimes is driving debates and practices about local academic publishing. Chapter 8, by Aliya Kuzhabekova, draws on interview data with journal editors from a wide range of disciplinary fields to explore how journals are engaging with national policy initiatives that emphasize IF as the key criterion for evaluating the quality of scholarly output. Kuzhabekova outlines the nature of the policy changes and the cluster of decisions being made by Kazakhstani journals in responses to such changes, including aspects such as peer review and whether to publish in English and/or Russian. Kuzhabekova uses the notion of ‘institutional isomorphism’ to analyze how local practices are being shaped by national and transnational dimensions and signals the decisions editors are making in the face of mechanisms that work to stratify academic journals. Chapter 9, by Cheryl Sheridan, likewise explores the impact of globally powerful evaluation mechanisms on local journal practices in the specific context of Taiwan, but she turns her attention specifically to practices of ‘peer review’. After outlining existing work on peer review as a scholarly practice, Sheridan uses one journal in the field of English language teaching as a case study to explore how local journals are engaging with the (implicit and explicit) demand for particular kinds of ‘blind review’. Drawing primarily on interview data, she analyzes the range of reviewing practices as well as editors and authors’ orientations toward these, tracking the interrelationship between practices as contributor and reviewer across local and ‘international’ journals. Using Blommaert’s (2010) work on scales and polycentricism, she argues that higher education in Taiwan, including scholarly publishing practices, can be considered ‘as a fractal replication of the global Anglophone center of scholarly publishing’. While the chapters by Kuzhabekova and Sheridan focus on the impact of top-down or centering practices on local journals, the third chapter in Part 3 explores a bottom-up initiative that seeks provide a specific kind of intellectual–reflexive space for contributors. In Chapter 10, Melba Cárdenas and Isobel Rainey chart the development of a journal in Colombia aimed at sustaining and developing teacher-researchers’ practice and expertise in the field of English language teaching. Given the specific focus, they argue, English is the obvious linguistic medium to use, as the journal not only provides a space for the central focus on a specific paradigm of pedagogic

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research, action research, but to improve the ‘linguistic competence’ of English language teacher-researchers. As a journal on the periphery, therefore, the editors’ decision to use English was driven by local rather than global imperatives. However, the positioning of the journal on the periphery, the authors argue, is a key dimension to its rationale for existence as well as the challenges it faces in securing international legitimacy. The rationale for the journal and the inspiration the journal generates is reflected in one comment by a contributor: ‘It’s important to know what our colleagues in other Latin American contexts are doing … the exchange of information helps us … improve our educational practices’. Securing international legitimacy is a more challenging task, with Cárdenas and Rainey pointing to how Anglophone center-based theory and research dominate the research and pedagogic agenda. The final three chapters of Part 3 take account of two key trends in journal publishing transnationally: multimodality and open access. Chapter 11, by Cheryl Ball, Andrew Morrison and Douglas Eyman, considers the potential of digitally mediated multimodal publishing for academic knowledge production and dissemination. Using three journals as case studies, they illustrate the intellectual value of multimodal/ multimedia publishing as well as the practicalities that need to be addressed to ensure successful multimodal publishing. Locating their chapter within the broader fields of digital rhetoric, multimodality and multiliteracies, Ball, Morrison and Eyman draw on 40 years of journal editorship to offer a detailed framework for developing multimodal publishing based on three types of infrastructure, ‘the scholarly, the social, and the technical’. They outline the guidelines generated by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and illustrate how these can be used ‘to promote the possibilities of webtext publishing’ across academic fields’. Chapters 12 and 13 focus on a phenomenon that is currently widely debated across academic circles: the issue of open access publishing. Chapter 12, by Françoise Salager-Meyer, offers a detailed historical account of the rise of open access and the values on which it is based. Her position on open access is clear from the outset: ‘I adopt Drott’s (2006) definition of OA (also called ‘e-democracy’) as a concept, a movement and an economic model meant to encourage scholarly authors to amend their publishing practices so as to enable the free distribution over the Internet of the research usually published in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings’. Salager-Meyer outlines the benefits of making freely available the written outputs of academic labor which, in addition to the basic principal of intellectual generosity, include an increase in citations, greater opportunities for collaboration and a solution to the ‘serials’ crisis’. Salager-Meyer’s argument is underpinned by a concern with the huge disparity globally in resources available to scholars to carry out research and the impact on the social needs and interests of local contexts. Citing the World Health Organization, she states, ‘of the 75 countries with a gross domestic product less than US$1000, 56% of medical institutions have not

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subscribed to any scientific journals in the past five years, and over 34% of medical institutions subscribed to only an average of two journals per year’. The consequences of such massive resourcing gaps are both intellectual and social. Salager-Meyer’s chapter illustrates that legitimately established and managed open access journals could constitute a narrowing of such gaps. The final chapter in Part 3 also focuses on open access but centers on the issue of ‘predatory journals’. While echoing Salager-Meyer’s claim for what they refer to as the ‘democratising possibilities of open access’, Ismaeil Fazel and Joel Heng Hartse review the phenomenon that has come to be called ‘predatory open access’ and use Beall’s core criteria – which includes aspects such as ‘lack of transparency in publishing operations’ and ‘insufficient information or hides information about author fees’ – to analyze the scholarly legitimacy of 20 journals they describe as ‘potentially predatory’. They also signal the way current evaluation regimes are often (indirectly) driving the phenomenon of predatory open access – the need to publish or perish – with scholars from resource-poor contexts often being the most vulnerable. The final part of book addresses emerging pedagogies that support English-medium publishing, including a course co-taught with disciplinary specialists; workshops about publishing for graduate students and advisors; and a postgraduate self-support group communicating via the WhatsApp phone application. As noted above, research on such pedagogies is in its infancy; thus, the themes raised in these chapters point to useful ways forward. In Chapter 14, Ju Chuan Huang describes a collaborative communications course she designed for engineering PhD students in a Taiwanese university using genre pedagogy, based on her understandings of the ‘benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration’ and co-taught with three engineering professors. Her research on the course demonstrated benefits for students; however, these benefits were hampered by structural issues, including the subject professor in charge unilaterally admitting a large number of master’s students into the course, thus forcing changes in the pedagogy that, Huang believes, diluted its effectiveness. A lack of communication among content specialists and writing instructor also resulted in some overlap in their course contributions, which were complicated by the content specialists developing their own terminology for generic aspects of research article genres. Huang identifies ‘the issue of power relationships between the two departments in disciplinary collaboration’ as one needing further research attention and recommends that ‘both parties need to meet regularly to share instruction, discuss expectations, and reconcile conflicts’. James Corcoran’s research on a workshop program for Mexican science PhD students, presented in Chapter 15, points to similar tensions in terms of whose understandings of English academic text production are addressed in the conceptualization and teaching of workshops by English specialists, journal editors and content specialists. Competing perspectives on writing as meaning English ‘grammar’ versus rhetoric/generic aspects

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versus the social practices of publishing were brought into relief depending on the views of English instructors and journal editors. The research showed that participants felt that the workshops overall were beneficial but they were disappointed with the linguistic aspect of the workshops. Corcoran identifies other considerations that may affect the effectiveness of publishing workshops, including participants’ levels of English, the stage of texts that scholars bring to workshops and the involvement of the PhD supervisors. Participants’ interests in having individual postworkshop support also points to the tension in many contexts between multilingual scholars’ desires for text-production support and limited resources. Finally, in Chapter 16, Soraya Abdulatief and Xolisa Guzula describe the workings of a postgraduate self-support group in South Africa whose members communicated across distance using the WhatsApp application. The data they collected via this electronic platform show how group members continued to support each other after participating in an institutionally sponsored writing group by using WhatsApp to set up joint online writing times, scaffold each other into producing doctoral and professional academic texts and provide encouragement, particularly in interpreting and responding to feedback from supervisors. During the data collection period, members worked on various postgraduate and professional genres, from dissertation proposals to dissertations to conference proposals to book chapters. Abdulatief and Guzula assert the value of transcending the dominant individualist academic writing model through a collective enterprise. They also argue persuasively for the value of translanguaging in this shared online practice, showing how the use of multiple South African languages (and emoticons) both created solidarity and affirmed participants’ identities, as they were required to use English for their official text production. WhatsApp is thus portrayed as a means creating a ‘safe space … for translanguaging as a resource for research and writing’. The chapters in this part thus explore different ways multilingual writers can be supported – and support each other – in their academic writing practices. These chapters share an interest in the multiple and sometimes conflicting roles of those involved in pedagogical initiatives. This crucial tension is one of the areas needing more research attention to pedagogical initiatives. In addition, as a number of contributors to this book note, longitudinal research needs to be undertaken to trace whether particular approaches to supporting multilingual writers are successful in terms of achieving publication in desired journals. As Corcoran articulates, ‘there is an acute need for such longitudinal empirical data in order to demonstrate whether writing for publication support is indeed beneficial, how it can improve (plurilingual) publication outcomes, and how it can be most effectively delivered’. In sum, the chapters in this book are grounded in a range of geolinguistic contexts and draw on a range of research methodologies and theoretical

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frameworks. While research from many parts of the world that have been underrepresented in the scholarship on academic publishing continues to be lacking, these contributions push the boundaries of research on academic publishing. At the same time, these chapters signal continuing tensions concerning who has access to the global academic marketplace, under what conditions and with what consequences.

Notes (1)

(2) (3) (4)

The impact factor, as created by Eugene Garfield, is ‘the ratio of the number of citations to “source items” (e.g. articles or other types of text) in a particular journal in one year to the number of articles published by that journal in the preceding two years’ (Lillis & Curry, 2010: 15; see Chapter 1 for our critique of the impact factor). Figures compiled in December 2016 by Kathy McGowan of the University of Rochester Libraries. Formerly available at: Beall’s list of predatory open access publishers. https:// scholarlyoa.com/2016/01/05/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2016/. The limited research on the African context included here and in the broader literature (but see Adebowale, 2001; Mweru, 2010; Omobawale et al., 2014; Soudien, 2014) may be explained by low research investment in most of the continent; nonetheless, it is an area that demands more attention as African scholars are coming under similar pressures as scholars in other geolinguistic contexts.

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Canagarajah, A.S. (2002) A Geopolitics of Academic Writing. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Cargill, M. and Burgess, S. (eds) (2017) Publishing Research in English as an Additional Language: Practices, Pathways and Potentials. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. Curry, M.J. and Lillis, T. (2004) Multilingual scholars and the imperative to publish in English: Negotiating interest, demands, and rewards. TESOL Quarterly 38 (4), 663–688. Curry, M.J. and Lillis, T. (2010) Academic research networks: Accessing resources for English-medium publishing. English for Specific Purposes 29 (4), 281–295. doi: 10.1016/j.esp.2010.06.002. Curry, M.J. and Lillis, T. (2013a) A Scholar’s Guide to Getting Published in English: Critical Choices and Practical Strategies. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Curry, M.J. and Lillis, T. (2013b) Introduction to the thematic issue: Participating in academic publishing – consequences of linguistic policies and practices. Language Policy 12 (3), 209–213. doi: 10.1007/s10993-013-9286-7. Curry, M.J. and Lillis, T. (2014) Strategies and tactics in academic knowledge production by multilingual scholars. Educational Policy Analysis Archives 22 (31). See http://dx.doi. org/10.14507/epaa.v22n32.2014. Delgado, J.E. (2014) Scientific journals of universities of Chile, Colombia and Venezuela: Actors and roles. Educational Policy Analysis Archives 22 (33). See http://dx.doi. org/10.14507/epaa.v22n33.2014. Deng, B. (2015, Jan. 6) English is the language of science. See http://www.slate. com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/01/english_is_the_language_of_ science_u_s_dominance_means_other_scientists.html (accessed 27 April 2017). Drott, M.C. (2006) Open access: Annual Review of International Science and Technology 40 (1), 79-109. doi: 10.1002/aris.144040010. Englander, K. and Uzuner-Smith, S. (2013) The role of policy in constructing the peripheral scientist in an era of globalization. Language Policy 12 (3), 231–250. See http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10993-012-9268-1. Feak, C. and Swales, J. (2009) Telling a Research Story: Writing a Literature Review. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Feak, C. and Swales, J. (2011) Creating Contexts: Writing Introductions across Genres. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Feng, H., Beckett, G. and Huang, D. (2013) From ‘import’ to ‘import–export’ oriented internationalization: The impact of national policy on scholarly publication in China. Language Policy 12 (3), 251–272. See http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10993-013-9285-8. Flowerdew, J. (2001) Attitudes of journal editors to nonnative speaker contributions. TESOL Quarterly 35 (1), 121–150. Ge, M. (2015) English writing for international publication in the age of globalization: Practices and perceptions of mainland Chinese academics in the humanities and social sciences. Publications 3 (2), 43–64. doi: 10.3390/publications3020043. Gentil, G. and Séror, J. (2014) Canada has two official languages: Or does it? Case studies of Canadian scholars’ language choices and practices in disseminating knowledge. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 13, 17–30. See http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.jeap.2013.10.005. Graham, S. (2015) Publish and be damned: Institutional pressure to conduct research and be published in Thailand. English Language Teacher Education and Development 17, 22–26. Gupta, B.M. and Kumbar, B.D. (2014) Social science research: A comparative study in terms of output from India, China, and Brazil. Informatics Studies 1 (1), 30–49. Hanauer, D. and Englander, K. (2011) Quantifying the burden of writing research articles in a second language: Data from Mexican scientists. Written Communication 28 (4), 403–416. doi: 10.1177/0741088311420056. Hanauer, D. and Englander, K. (2013) Scientific Writing in a Second Language. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press.

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Hazelkorn, E. (2014) Rankings and the global reputation race. In L.M. Portnoi and S.S. Bagley (eds) Critical Perspectives on Global Competition in Higher Education (New Directions for Higher Education 168) (pp. 13–26). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. doi: 10.1002/he. Huang, J.C. (2014) Learning to write for publication in English through genre-based pedagogy: A case in Taiwan. System 45, 175–186. See http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.system.2014.05.010. Ishikawa, M. (2014) Ranking regime and the future of vernacular scholarship. Education Policy Analysis Archives 22 (31). See http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v22n30.2014. Kaplan, R. and Baldauf, R. (2005) Editing contributed scholarly articles from a language management perspective. Journal of Second Language Writing 14, 47–62. doi: 10.1016/j. jslw.2005.01.001. Lee, H. and Lee, K. (2013) Publish (in international indexed journals) or perish: Neoliberal ideology in a Korean university. Language Policy 12 (3), 215–230. See http://dx.doi. org/10.1007/s10993-012-9267-2. Lillis, T. (2012a) Economies of signs in writing for academic publication: The case of English medium ‘national’ journals. Journal of Advanced Composition 32 (3–4), 695–722. Lillis, T. (2012b) English medium writing for academic purposes: Foundational categories, certainty and contingency. In R. Tang (ed.) Academic Writing in a Second or Foreign Language: Issues and Challenges Facing ESL/EFL Academic Writers in Higher Education Contexts (pp. 235–247). London: Continuum. Lillis, T. (2013) The Sociolinguistics of Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lillis, T. and Curry, M.J. (2006a) Reframing notions of competence in scholarly writing: From individual to networked activity. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 53, 63–78. Lillis, T. and Curry, M.J. (2006b) Professional academic writing by multilingual scholars: Interactions with literacy brokers in the production of English-medium texts. Written Communication 23 (1), 3–35. Lillis, T. and Curry, M.J. (2010) Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English. London: Routledge. Lillis, T. and Curry, M.J. (2013) English, scientific publishing and participation in the global knowledge economy. In E. Erling and P. Seargeant (eds) English and International Development (pp. 220–242). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Lillis, T. and Curry, M.J. (2015) The politics of English, language and uptake: The case of international academic journal article reviews. AILA Review 28 (1), 127–150. doi: 10.1075/aila.28.06lil. Lillis, T. and Curry, M.J. (2016) Academic writing for publication in a multilingual world. In R. Manchón and P.K. Matsuda (eds) Handbook of Second and Foreign Language Writing (pp. 201–222). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Leydesdorff, L. and Wagner, C. (2009) Is the United States losing ground in science? A global perspective on the world science system. Scientometrics 78 (1), 23–36. Lorés-Sanz, R., Mur-Dueñas, P. and Lafuente-Millán, E. (eds) (2010) Constructing Interpersonality: Multiple Perspectives on Written Academic Genres. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Min, H-T. (2014) Participating in international academic publishing: A Taiwan perspective. TESOL Quarterly 48 (1), 188–200. doi: 10.1002/tesq.154. Monjeau, A., Rau, J.R. and Anderson, C. (2013) Latin America should ditch impact factors. Nature 499, 29. Mweru, M. (2010) Why Kenyan academics do not publish in international refereed journals. In UNESCO (ed.) World Social Science Report: Knowledge Divides (pp. 110–111). Paris: UNESCO. National Science Foundation (2016) Science and Engineering Indicators. See https://www. nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/#/report/chapter-5/outputs-of-s-e-researchpublications-and-patents/s-e-publication-output (accessed 27 April 2017).

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Omobowale, A.O. (2014) Peripheral scholarship and the context of foreign paid publishing in Nigeria. Current Sociology 62 (5), 666–684. doi: 10.1177/0011392113508127. Ondari-Okemwa, E. (2007, Oct.) Scholarly publishing in sub-Saharan Africa in the twenty-first century: Challenges and opportunities. First Monday 12 (10). See http:// firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/1966/1842. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2015) OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard. See www.oecd.org/sti/scoreboard.html (accessed 10 August 2017). Petrić, B. (2014) English-medium journals in Serbia: Editors’ perspectives. In K. Bennett (ed.) The Semiperiphery of Academic Writing: Discourses, Communities and Practices (pp. 189–209). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pho, P.D. and Tran, T.M.P. (2016) Obstacles to scholarly publishing in the social sciences and humanities: A case study of Vietnamese scholars. Publications 4, 19. doi: 10.3390. Queiroz de Barros, R. (2014) Changing research writing practice in Romania: Perceptions and attitudes. In K. Bennett (ed.) The Semiperiphery of Academic Writing: Discourse, Communities and Practices (pp. 105–147). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Retraction Watch (2017) ‘Why did Beall’s list of potential predatory publishers go dark?’ See http://retractionwatch.com/2017/01/17/bealls-list-potential-predatorypublishers-go-dark/ (accessed 27 April 2017). Salager-Meyer, F. (2008) Scientific publishing in developing countries: Challenges for the future. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7, 121–132. See http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.jeap.2008.03.009. Salager-Meyer, F. (2012) The open access movement or “edemocracy”: Its birth, rise, problems and solutions. Ibérica 24, 9-28. Sano, H. (2002) The world’s lingua franca of science. English Today 8, 45–49. SCImago (2007) SJR: SCImago Journal and Country Rank. See http://www.scimagojr. com (accessed 27 April 2017). Sheridan, C. (2015) National journals and centering institutions: A historiography of an English language teaching journal in Taiwan. English for Specific Purposes 38, 70–84. See http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2014.12.001. Soudien, C. (2014) The influence of rankings and incentive systems on academic publishing in South African universities. Educational Policy Analysis Archives 22 (33). See http:// dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v22n33.2014. Swales, J. and Feak, C. (2000) English in Today’s Research World: A Writing Guide. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (2015) UNESCO Science Report: Towards 1030. Executive Summary. Paris: UNESCO Publishing. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (2016) World Social Science Report 2016. Challenging Inequalities: Pathways to a Just World. Paris: UNESCO Publishing. van Weijen, D. (2012, Nov.) The language of (future) scientific communication. Research Trends 31. See https://www.researchtrends.com/issue-31-november-2012/thelanguage-of-future-scientific-communication/ (accessed 27 April 2017). Wallerstein, I. (1991) Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ware, M. (2006) Scientific Publishing in Transition: An Overview of Current Developments. Bristol: Mark Ware Consulting. Web of Science (2017) http://wokinfo.com/?utm_source=false&utm_medium= false&utm_campaign=false&utm_source=false&utm_medium=false&utm_ campaign=false (accessed 27 April 27 2017). World Bank (2016) ‘New country classifications by income level’. The Data Blog. See blogs. worldbank.org/opendata/new-country-classifications-2016 (accessed 9 August 2017).

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Lost in Quantification: Scholars and the Politics of Bibliometrics Lynn P. Nygaard and Rocco Bellanova

As scholarship becomes increasingly globalized, bibliometric systems for quantifying research productivity have become increasingly relevant to academia (Gingras, 2014; Hicks et al., 2015; Lillis & Curry, 2010; Pansu et al., 2013). Bibliometric indicators are used to convert information about research activity (primarily publications and citations) into numbers that, in their apparent neutrality, seem to transcend linguistic and cultural (including disciplinary) boundaries. Developed as a way to study academic publication and citation patterns statistically, bibliometrics were originally used mostly for research purposes – to substantiate claims about who produces what and under which circumstances (De Bellis, 2014). Today, however, bibliometrics are most familiar to scholars as evaluative devices (see, e.g. Pansu et al., 2013). Bibliometric indicators are used to assess research performance, not only at the institutional level (to distribute funding to universities, rank journals and so on) but also increasingly at the individual level in the context of hiring or promotion decisions (Gingras, 2014). For those asked to evaluate the work of scholars from different countries, disciplines or contexts, the promise of simple indicators that would enable comparisons based on seemingly objective metrics – applicable beyond disciplinary and linguistic boundaries – can be enticing. The question is whether current bibliometric indicators are as neutral as they seem – whether they satisfactorily ‘quantify’ scholarly activity and whether the resulting number means the same thing to scholars across different settings (Gingras, 2014). The aim of this chapter is to look at bibliometrics as a specific instance of quantification and thus – as with any other form of quantification – as a form of governing things and people. The politics of bibliometrics deserve to be unpacked because even with the best intentions, developers of bibliometric indicators must make non-trivial decisions about how to measure things that are notoriously difficult to quantify (De Bellis, 2014). These decisions require answering important questions such as: What does

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‘productivity’ entail? What should count and how should it be counted? (Gingras, 2014). Bibliometrics play a key role in conceptualizing scientific research as a ‘knowledge economy’ by attempting to measure how effectively resources are converted into output (publications and patents, but also citations, which often stand in for prestige; see, e.g. Gutwirth and Christiaens [2015]) and then using these measurements to justify, for example, the allocation of funding (Gingras, 2014). Their evaluative role also can encourage researchers and institutes to adopt a set of practices that generate the highest number of publications, citations or patents – drawing attention away from activities that are not captured by these indicators (such as student supervision, mentoring, teaching, administrative work, etc.) (Elzinga, 2010; Gingras, 2014). This single-minded focus on productivity not only threatens to erode the diversity in scientific practices but can also systematically disadvantage scholars whose practices differ from the norms established by the indicators. For example, if a bibliometric indicator captures only (or primarily) English language outputs because the database used to calculate the indicator is limited to mostly English language publications, then scholars who do not publish in English may not only receive a lower numerical assessment, but their works risk also becoming less visible on the international academic landscape (Pansu et al., 2013). And researchers who decide to publish in English to gain entrance to high-ranking journals may feel pressured to focus on research topics that appeal to Anglo-Saxon audiences at the risk of losing local knowledge (Gingras, 2014; Lillis & Curry, 2010). In line with other critical voices (see, e.g. Hug et al., 2014; Pansu et al., 2013), we are also skeptical about the widespread use of bibliometrics because money and power are involved in their construction and use. Not only are bibliometric indicators used to allocate funding in researchproducing settings and to support hiring and promotion, but bibliometrics are also in many cases an international business in themselves. Notwithstanding the rise of alternative models of metrics, the most-used citations-based indicators are computed using large-scale databases owned and run by private companies (Pansu et al., 2013: 26ff). Thomson Reuters owns the Science Citation Index, the Social Science Citation Index and the Arts and Humanities Citation Indexes, created and managed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) since the 1960s and accessed through the platform Web of Science (WoS). The other two systems were released in 2004: Scopus, run by Elsevier; and Google Scholar (GS), created by Google. These databases stand as the main tools used in both scholarly bibliographic searches and citation indexes and can be considered global sources: Their stated ambition is to include a significant amount of the worldwide academic output; their focus is not limited to a given field of scientific knowledge; they are used and recognized by such diverse users as researchers, funding agencies and performance evaluators; and they

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are all commercial services provided by private companies with a global outreach. The data from these databases are used, for example, to generate the impact factor of journals (calculated using ISI indexes) and to create international rankings of universities, such as the QS World University Rankings or the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, which both use Scopus to calculate citations per university (see QS, 2016; Times Higher Education, 2015). Yet, the ‘global’ character of these databases has been questioned (Lillis & Curry, 2010), with a study by Mongeon and PaulHus (2016) showing the systematic underrepresentation in both the WoS and Scopus in terms of linguistic and disciplinary coverage (e.g. journals not published in English and journals in the fields of social sciences and humanities). Unpacking the politics of bibliometrics involves looking at the choices made in developing an indicator or database and the consequences of those choices for various groups of researchers, keeping in mind the money and power at stake. It also involves taking a look at what kinds of innovations or adjustments are made to indicators over time: Bibliometrics are produced through more or less complex algorithms, where adjustments are common (e.g. more data are introduced as input, further computing power becomes available or a different output is sought). Gillespie (2014: 178), for example, notes that ‘algorithms can easily, instantly, radically, and invisibly be changed. While major upgrades may happen only on occasion, algorithms are regularly being “tweaked”’. These ‘tweaks’ are made for a reason; thus, exploring these reasons for adjustments – as well as looking at who wins and loses when they are implemented – also sheds light on the politics of bibliometrics as a tool for governing scholarly practices. In this chapter, therefore, we explore the ‘political’ moments of bibliometric design to illustrate how the development of bibliometric indicators is not merely technical but also based on choices that communicate power through their social impacts. The chapter is organized as follows: First, we present our theoretical perspective, which draws from the traditions of science and technology studies (STS) and academic literacies theory to conceptualize academic publishing as a social practice where technologies (such as bibliometric databases and algorithms) play a key role in articulating the values that underlie scholarly production. This perspective sheds light on how power is communicated through the creation of metrics – how measuring a phenomenon turns into defining it and thus how some groups can become marginalized. We illustrate this perspective by describing some of the dilemmas developers can face when constructing a bibliometric indicator that is intended to work fairly across different academic contexts. We then take a closer look at examples of two kinds of metrics to illustrate how the politics of bibliometrics work in practice: GS as an example focused on citations where technological innovations set it apart from its competitors,

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and the Norwegian Publication Indicator (NPI), an output-based indicator for performance-based funding of research-producing institutions in Norway. We demonstrate how each of these examples represents innovations that are meant to improve fairness yet do not fundamentally challenge the underlying notions of impact, quality and productivity that give primacy to the natural sciences and English language publications and thus marginalize scholars in both the geolinguistic periphery (Lillis & Curry, 2010) and the social sciences and humanities. We conclude with some thoughts about the importance of maintaining a critical stance about what goes into the construction of bibliometric indicators, how they are used and what academia stands to lose from their widespread (and uncritical) use.

Theoretical perspective: Academic publishing as a social practice and the communication of power Measuring research performance requires making assumptions about quantification as a process of measuring and academic publishing as an object to be measured. Combining notions from STS and academic literacies theories enables us to construct a framework for unpacking these assumptions. First, the field of STS examines how concrete practices and technologies shape, and are shaped by, science. In this perspective, the how of bibliometrics matters – how indicators are constructed and used and how quantification takes place (Bowker & Leigh Star, 1999; Desrosières, 2014). STS-inspired research challenges assumptions that quantification is a straightforward and objective activity that mirrors reality (Espeland & Stevens, 2008). STS invites us to take seriously ‘technicalities’ as key elements of scientific and social life and offers conceptual tools to apprehend their social dimensions. A central idea in STS is that quantification and measurement are not synonymous: With quantification, what is at stake is translating something non-numerical into numbers, while measurement operates with something already in numerical form (Desrosières, 2014). Quantification thus requires the crucial first step of translation: the definition of socio-technical conventions concerning what can be counted and what values should be assigned to what is being counted. This step leads to commensuration, that is, ‘the valuation or measuring of different objects with a common metric’ (Espeland & Stevens, 2008: 408). The act of deciding what should be counted in bibliometric indicators and what values should be assigned does not merely describe scientific production but also interrogates the value of scientific work: it may confirm, reinforce, question or deny it (Pansu et al., 2013). In other words, any form of classification legitimizes some types of output and delegitimizes others (Gruber, 2014). And as individual academics shape their behavior in response to such classifications (Michels & Schmoch, 2014), the use of bibliometric indicators for evaluation does not simply ‘objectively measure’ academic

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activity, but rather sets standards for desired behavior – whether intended or not (Gingras, 2014; Gutwirth & Christiaens, 2015). Thus, bibliometrics move from describing productivity to co-defining it, creating an idealized image of scholarly activity (Gruber, 2014). Academic literacies theory complements this perspective by drawing attention to the complex nature of academic writing. Instead of seeing academic writing as a monolithic practice, it conceptualizes academic writing as a situated social activity, where what are considered acceptable practices may change depending on the purpose, audience and context of the writing (Barton et al., 2000; Lea & Street, 2006; Lillis & Curry, 2010). Academic literacies theory acknowledges that academic contexts vary considerably (in terms of disciplines, methodological traditions, orientation to academic versus applied output, languages and research subject matter), which means that individual writers may experience tensions between conflicting institutional expectations as well as their own identities as writers (Curry & Lillis, 2014; Nygaard, 2017). While a main focus of academic literacies research has been on student writing, conceptualizing academic writing as a situated social practice has clear implications for understanding faculty publishing (Curry & Lillis, 2014). Viewing academic writing and publishing as social practices that differ across contexts challenges assumptions that academic publishing is a function of hours spent on research; that the writing process is the same for academics across various contexts; that the output of this process will be a product easily identifiable as an academic publication; that this product will be simple to include in the body of data that the metric draws from; and that, once published, the product will be cited by other scholars in accordance with its quality. The academic literacies perspective implies that, depending on the setting, authors face a number of decisions about which genre to produce, how to conceptualize quality (including where to submit a publication), whether to collaborate and with whom and to what extent to prioritize producing a publication over other pressing tasks that researchers regularly face (Nygaard, 2017). The main ideas from STS and academic literacies that inform our perspective on the politics of bibliometrics can be summarized as follows: Decisions made by the developers of bibliometric indicators about how to quantify research productivity inevitably advantage some researchers more than others because researchers follow different patterns in their behaviors – including what they produce, how they collaborate, where they publish and how they use citations – based on discipline and geographical region. Because bibliometric indicators are associated with explicit or implicit rewards, they thus perform power and can inform behavior (if scholars strategically act to improve their productivity in bibliometric terms, see Michels & Schmoch [2014]) or marginalize scholars in certain groups, or both.

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Diverse academic practices and design dilemmas To flesh out this theoretical perspective and illustrate its practical relevance, in this section we briefly describe the kinds of decisions a developer might make about how to quantify journal articles in a bibliometric indicator: first translating the concept of ‘journal article’ into something that can be counted and then counting it. To function well as an indicator, a metric needs to include zero items that fail to meet the defined criteria and all items that do meet the criteria (Hicks et al., 2015). Journal articles, generally considered the gold standard of publishing, are not easy to measure on either of these counts because it is not always clear when something can be considered a legitimate journal. Relevant criteria include peer-review procedures, sponsors of the journal, quality assurance mechanisms, types of articles, original articles or translations, etc. Erring on the side of inclusivity might allow non-peer-reviewed or duplicate works to be reported as original research (but see discussion in Lillis & Curry [2010] about ‘equivalent publishing’ by multilingual scholars), while erring on the side of caution and rigor may exclude some items meeting the criteria. Once the developer has decided what constitutes a relevant journal article, the decision about whether all journal articles should be counted equally must be made. If some are assumed to be higher quality than others, how is quality to be recognized and how much value should be assigned to different degrees of quality (Walters, 2014)? If quality is associated with citations (either through the impact factor of the journal or the number of times the article has been cited), how are different groups’ systematically different citation practices accounted for? The significance and usage of the citation not only varies between disciplines (Hyland, 1999; Walters, 2014), but there is also evidence that scholars in the geolinguistic periphery or semiperiphery are cited less often simply because of their geolinguistic location and that citations from journals based in the geolinguistic periphery are less valued than citations from journals in the core (Lillis et al., 2010). The next question that the developer faces is whether the metric will value journal articles in relation to other academic outputs. Monographs and book chapters, for example, are common outputs, but their prevalence varies across disciplines: scholars in the humanities produce the most books relative to the other disciplines, while researchers in the natural sciences produce the fewest (Aagaard et al., 2015; Piro et al., 2013). Metrics that assign value only to journal articles disadvantage groups that publish a broader range of genres. If the developer aims for a complex metric that also includes outputs other than articles, the question becomes how to count them relative to journal articles. Designing a metric means assigning a numerical value that specifies the difference in value across disciplines; in some fields, book chapters might count almost as much as a journal article, whereas in others they may be seen as having little value. No matter

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what value is chosen, it may disadvantage at least some fields or disciplines, making cross-disciplinary comparison of research performance difficult. Finally, the developer faces the problem of how to count co-authorship in terms of allocating full or partial credit per publication. This decision could advantage one discipline over another because scholars in the natural sciences (and quantitative social sciences) tend to work in teams, while scholars in the humanities and (qualitative social sciences) often work alone or in pairs (Aagaard et al., 2015; Hug et al., 2014). Choosing to fractionalize favors solo publishing, while using whole counts inflates the productivity of those working in teams. These dilemmas show how the developer of a bibliometric system does not simply describe productivity but also defines it. The resulting indicator specifies what is considered legitimate scholarly activity and what is not. Those whose normal scholarly practices include a substantial proportion of outputs delegitimized by the metrics developer (e.g. journal articles in journals in languages other than English or publications for nonacademic audiences) risk becoming marginalized unless they improve their productivity scores, which could reduce diversity in scholarly practices. In this way, the widespread use of bibliometrics can govern behavior (Michels & Schmoch, 2014). Attaching funding or other rewards to these bibliometric indicators communicates this governing power all the more strongly (see articles in the special issue of Language Policy edited by Curry & Lillis [2013]). Below, we explore different aspects of the politics of bibliometrics by taking a closer look at two examples: GS, a global citation database; and the NPI, a national output-based productivity indicator used for performancebased funding. Both examples represent design innovations in bibliometrics that could, in theory, benefit scholars in the periphery by being more inclusive in comparison to other systems.

Google Scholar: A global citation database To understand the overall functioning of the mainstream bibliometric systems (GS, WoS and Scopus), it is worth breaking them down into their main elements: databases, algorithms and interfaces. In particular, approaching databases and algorithms ‘as analytically distinct’ (Gillespie, 2014: 169) permits us to better understand how these systems follow the two-step process of quantification. The first step is the creation of conventions to translate things into computable data, which is followed by the measurement of the obtained data. Compared to the WoS and Scopus databases, GS applies a different rationale for deciding what counts. In GS, the scientific nature of the works indexed is presumed a priori instead of having to be evaluated through publication in prescribed channels, as with WoS or Scopus. According to Delgado López-Cózar et al. (2014: 447), ‘GS

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automatically retrieves, indexes, and stores any type of scientific material uploaded by an author without any previous external control.’ Indeed, when it comes to defining what is scholarly output, GS addresses webmasters rather than authors or journal editors, stating that the content hosted on your website must consist primarily of scholarly articles – journal papers, conference papers, technical reports, or their drafts, dissertations, pre-prints, post-prints, or abstracts. Content such as news or magazine articles, book reviews, and editorials is not appropriate for Google Scholar. (Google, 2016) In contrast, for WoS and Scopus, the worth of a scientific outlet must be proven using several quantitative and qualitative criteria. In the case of Scopus, the criteria for the indexation of a new journal range from the ‘type of peer review’ to ‘publishing regularity’ and from having an International Standard Serial Number to having titles and abstracts in English regardless of the language of the journal (Elsevier, 2016). WoS and Scopus work with ever-increasing but strictly bounded databases, and their gatekeeping policies represent assumptions about what constitutes good research practice (for a critique of these criteria, see Pansu et al. [2013: 94–96]). GS, on the other hand, draws on a potentially unbounded database (i.e. the Internet), where the patrolling of what is considered scientific is left to other actors (e.g. publishers and university repositories). As noted, for Google, the key actors are the webmasters of scientific repositories, who ensure that publications are made readable by Google robot crawlers (Google, 2016). In other words, journals and other academic repositories must adopt specific technical formats in order to be read by the Google machines and computed. Ultimately, this approach is supposed to let scientific worth speak for itself: From a scientific point of view, it is not inclusion in the database that matters, but rather the citation patterns generated by a work that will show its quality. GS is also a ‘freely available’ service (Bar-Ilan, 2008: 257). There is no fee for carrying out searches or calculating commonly used metrics. Authors can create and to some extent manage their online profile. Based on the information provided at registration, GS offers a series of results (e.g. publications attributed to them). Updates to the author’s profile are automatically implemented or submitted to the authors for review to increase the precision of the information obtained by the robots. Authors can calculate their metrics and decide whether to make their profile public (Google, 2016). Yet, according to critics, the user-friendliness of GS has contributed to reinforcing the abuse of bibliometrics rather than challenging the role they play in evaluating scholarly activity (Delgado López-Cózar et al., 2014; Gingras, 2014).

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Because the citation-focused conventions used by GS are more inclusive than the approaches of Scopus or the WoS, scholars publishing in languages other than English and/or working in the social sciences and humanities may find more of their publications and citations on GS than in the WoS or Scopus (Harzing & Alakangas, 2016). However, GS appears to err on the side of too much openness, potentially allowing the inclusion of items that do not meet the criteria, such as non-peer-reviewed works or duplicates (e.g. Delgado López-Cózar et al., 2014). We argue that GS’s approach does not challenge the notion of citations as a key measure of impact or quality, but actually boosts this idea by widening the pool of citations from which to draw. Nor does GS critically engage with the reality that citation practices differ across disciplines and geolinguistic settings. Several researchers (e.g. Bar-Ilan, 2008; Delgado López-Cózar et al., 2014; Gingras, 2014) have highlighted GS’s limitations. But comparing the functioning of GS to that of WoS and Scopus invites an unpacking of the ‘black-box evaluation machine[s]’ (Hicks et al., 2015: 430), which, we argue, opens a space to more radically question the implications of adopting citations measurement as the gold standard of what matters in scientific practice.

The Norwegian Publication Indicator: An output-based indicator of productivity The purpose of the NPI is to quantify original research output at the institutional level. As a national metric, it stands in contrast to panelbased peer review models, such as the Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom (subsequently replaced by the metric-oriented Research Excellence Framework; see Schneider, 2009). In the NPI, data are harvested systematically from indexes such as WoS but also supplemented through regular mandatory institutional reporting (Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions, 2004). The indicator is designed to help distribute national government funds to research-producing institutions, and as such it functions as an incentive that rewards desired publishing behavior with points that convert to funding (Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions, 2004; Sivertsen, 2010). Schneider argues that when the indicator was introduced in 2004, it was ‘novel and innovative’ in attempting to acknowledge different publications patterns across disciplines by taking into account not only journal articles but also books and chapters (Schneider, 2009: 8; see also Aagaard et al., 2015). The NPI works by assigning points to publications affiliated with each research institute, weighting each publication based on its genre and where it is published (Sivertsen, 2010) (see Table 2.1). ‘Level 1’ channels comprise all academic presses and journals (in any language) that meet the basic criteria, including having an ISSN and established peer-review procedures.

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Table 2.1 NPI points by publication category and level of publication channel Category Journal article Monograph Book chapter or article in anthology

Level 1 1

Level 2 3

5

8

0.7

1

To avoid having scholars maximize their points by submitting only to ‘easy’ journals or presses (Schneider, 2009), about 20% of the journals in each field (and some presses) have been identified as top-tier (‘Level 2’); articles published in Level 2 journals or presses receive additional points. Disciplinebased evaluation boards determine which presses and journals are Level 1 or Level 2, based on a combination of factors (including impact factor and reputation within a discipline). However, the resulting conflicts of interest and ‘horse trading’ that have ensued as a result of this classification process have been a major target of criticism (Aagaard et al., 2015: 112). Although the NPI includes books and book chapters, it gives primacy to the journal article. As Table 2.1 shows, this discrepancy is most evident in the relative increase in points between Level 1 and Level 2, where journal articles triple in value, but books and book chapters do not even double. And although Norwegian language journals are given credit, they are almost completely absent from the more prestigious Level 2 lists – because ‘international’ is a key criterion for being considered as Level 2. Indeed, no Norwegian publishing companies – including the top-ranked university presses – are categorized as Level 2 (Brock-Utne, 2007). Adjustments are constantly being made to which journals qualify to be top tier (Sivertsen, 2010), but no effort is being made to change the two-level model, despite the desire by some scholars for more levels (asserting that two levels do not represent a sufficient degree of differentiation between journals in their field). Other scholars suggest eliminating these levels because the distinction between Level 1 and Level 2 sometimes appears arbitrary (see, e.g. Rice, 2013). Adjustment has occurred, however, in the way the system awards points to co-authorship. Fractionalization was included from the beginning because of the distortion inherent in counting a co-authored work multiple times (once for each co-author) (Kyvik, 2003). Rather than each co-author (or each institute) being able to claim one whole output, they are each given a fraction of the available points. From 2015, fractionalization is no longer based on a simple fraction but rather a square root (e.g. with four authors, each would get 0.50 points rather than 0.25) in order to increase field neutrality (i.e. ‘fairness’) by ‘correcting’ for the version that favored solo publications (Aagaard et al., 2015; Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2015: 60). While authors in the social sciences and humanities also gain by co-authorship being given

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33

greater value, the natural sciences gain significantly more – as was intended, according to the Ministry of Education and Research in its proposed 2016 national budget for higher education (Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2015). The second adjustment made to the Norwegian model from 2015 is increased incentive for scholars to cooperate internationally. When one co-author is ‘international’ (with an institutional affiliation outside Norway, regardless of the nationality of the author), the total point sum is multiplied by 1.3. An additional incentive for international collaboration is likely to further marginalize those who publish in Norwegian. It is unlikely that international collaborating partners are able to write sufficiently well in Norwegian, unless the partner is another Norwegian who is affiliated with an institute outside of Norway. The effect of this adjustment, if the incentives work as intended, will be an increase in English publications, which may entail a reduction in Norwegian publications (Ossenblok, 2012).

Conclusion: What is Lost in Quantification In this chapter, we have described what we call the ‘politics of bibliometrics’. We have argued that because bibliometrics appear in numerical form – as a measure of citations or productivity – they give the impression of having neutrality and objectivity, although they are highly normative in their construction and usage. Bibliometrics heavily influence decisions that matter about whom to hire, promote or fund. The ability of bibliometric indicators to legitimize some scholarly practices and delegitimize others affects not just individual scholars or institutions, but also the diversity of publication practices (if scholars limit their publishing to only things that count and avoid, for example, targeting non-academic audiences). And if scholars in the margins shift their publication language to English and accordingly adapt the focus of their work to suit AngloSaxon journals, we risk losing local knowledges (Brock Utne, 2007; Gingras, 2014; Lillis & Curry, 2013). Central to our discussion has been a focus on the choices made in the construction of metrics, particularly with respect to how scholarly practices are categorized. The nature of categorizing inevitably ‘valorizes some point of view and silences another’ (Bowker & Leigh Star, 1999: 5–6). As such, developing bibliometrics becomes a choice about what is to be valorized – what can be counted as scholarly. Both GS and the Norwegian model represent innovations with respect to inclusion of scholars in the periphery, but they also highlight the difficulties of quantification, translating notions of ‘scholarship,’ ‘quality’ and ‘impact’ into metrics that can be used in the same way across disciplines and geographical contexts. Compared to similar databases, GS applies a more inclusive rationale of ‘what counts’, but it does not contest the assumed role that citations play in scholarship or take into account how citation practices may differ across settings. The

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Norwegian Publications Indicator also represents an innovation in attaining ‘field neutrality,’ but it has received criticism for its non-transparent way of determining which channels should qualify as top tier (Aagaard et al., 2015); the difficulty of attaining field neutrality is highlighted in the recent adjustments made to the mode of fractionalization to redirect more funding to the natural sciences (Sandström & Erik, 2009). Perhaps of greater concern to what might be lost is the adjustment to adding points for international collaboration, which provides an additional incentive to publish in English rather than Norwegian. Unpacking the politics of bibliometric systems by examining how they categorize and quantify scholarly activity, how they communicate power and what kind of impact they have on scholarly publishing practices, particularly in global terms, helps open up bibliometrics to a debate in which more scholars may feel confident and compelled to participate. While the need for bibliometric indicators is likely to persist in academia, our hope is that bibliometrics will not be used uncritically, and that scholars and policymakers will become increasingly aware of what may be lost in these quantification processes.

Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank the editors for their comments as well as the participants in the research seminar at the Centre de Recherche en Science Politique (CReSPo) of the Université Saint-Louis, Bruxelles, for their feedback on a preliminary version of this chapter. Lynn P. Nygaard’s research has been supported by PRIO and the Research Council of Norway. Rocco Bellanova’s research has been carried out with the support of the following projects: Actions de recherche concertées (ARC) – ‘Why Regulate? Regulation, De-Regulation and Legitimacy of the EU’ (funded by the Communauté française de Belgique); and NordSTEVA – ‘Nordic Centre for Security Technologies and Societal Values’ (funded by NordFORSK).

References Aagaard, K., Bloch, C. and Schneider, J.W. (2015) Impacts of performance-based research funding systems: The case of the Norwegian Publication Indicator. Research Evaluation 24, 106–117. Bar-Ilan, J. (2008) Which h-index? A comparison of WoS, Scopus and Google Scholar. Scientometrics 74 (2), 257–271. Barton, D., Hamilton, M. and Ivanic, R. (eds) (2000) Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context. London: Routledge. Bowker, G.C. and Leigh Star, S. (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Brock-Utne, B. (2007, Summer) Is Norwegian threatened as an academic language? International Higher Education 48 (Summer), 15–16.

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Curry, M.J. and Lillis, T. (2014) Strategies and tactics in academic knowledge production by multilingual scholars. Education Policy Analysis Archives 22 (32), 1–23. See http:// dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v22n32.2014. De Bellis, N. (2014) History and evolution of (biblio)metrics. In B. Cronin and C.R. Sugimoto (eds) Beyond Bibliometrics: Harnessing Multidimensional Indicators of Scholarly Impact (pp. 23–44). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Delgado López-Cózar, E., Robinson-García, N. and Torres-Salinas, D. (2014) The Google scholar experiment: How to index false papers and manipulate bibliometric indicators. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 65 (3), 446–454. Desrosières, A. (2014) Le gouvernement de la cité néolibérale: quand la quantification rétroagit sur les acteurs [The governing of the neoliberal city: When quantification has a feedback effect on the actors]. In A. Desrosières (ed.) Prouver et gouverner. Une analyse politique des statistiques publiques [Proving and Governing. A Political Analysis of Public Statistics] (pp. 33–59). Paris: La Découverte. Elsevier (2016) Content policy and selection. See https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/ scopus/content/content-policy-and-selection (accessed 17 April 2017). Elzinga, A. (2010) New public management, science policy and the orchestration of university research: Academic science the loser. The Journal for Transdiciplinary Research in Southern Africa 6 (2), 307–332. Espeland, W.N. and Stevens, M.L. (2008) A sociology of quantification. Archives Européennes de Sociologie: European Journal of Sociology 49 (3), 401–436. Gillespie, T. (2014) The relevance of algorithms. In T. Gillespie, P.J. Boczkowski and K.A. Foot (eds) Media Technologies. Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (pp. 167–193). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Gingras, Y. (2014) Les dérives de l’évaluation de la recherche. Du bon usage de la bibliométrie. Paris: Raisons d’Agir. (Published by MIT Press [2016] as Bibliometrics and Research Evaluation: Uses and Abuses.) Google (2016) Inclusion guidelines for webmasters. See https://scholar.google.com/intl/ en/scholar/inclusion.html#overview (accessed 17 April 2017). Gruber, T. (2014) Academic sell-out: How an obsession with metrics and rankings is damaging academia. Journal of Marketing for Higher Education 24 (2), 165–177. Gutwirth, S. and Christiaens, T. (2015) Les sciences et leurs problèmes: La fraude scientifique, un moyen de diversion? [Sciences and their problems: Scientific fraud, a diversion?]. Revue Interdisciplinaire d’Études Juridiques 74 (1), 21–49. Harzing, A.-W. and Alakangas, S. (2016) Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science: A longitudinal and cross-disciplinary comparison. Scientometrics 106 (2), 787–804. Hicks, D., Wouters, P., Waltman, L., de Rijcke, S. and Rafols, I. (2015) Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics. Nature 520 (7548), 429–431. Hug, S.E., Ochsner, M. and Daniel, H.-D. (2014) A framework to explore and develop criteria for assessing research quality in the humanities. International Journal for Education Law and Policy 10 (1), 55–64. Hyland, K. (1999) Academic attribution: Citation and the construction of disciplinary knowledge. Applied Linguistics 20 (3), 341–367. Kunnskapsdepartementet (2015) Orientering om forslag til statsbudsjettet 2016 for universitet og høgskolar [Orientation on the proposed national budget 2016 for universities and colleges]. See https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/ departementene/kd/orientering-om-forslag-til-statsbudsjettet-2016-uh.pdf#page =60 (accessed 17 April 2017). Kyvik, S. (2003) Changing trends in publishing behaviour among university faculty, 1980–2000. Scientometrics 58 (1), 35–48.

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Lea, M.R. and Street, B.V. (2006) The ‘academic literacies’ model: Theory and applications. Theory Into Practice 45 (4), 368–377. Lillis, T. and Curry, M.J. (2010) Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English. London: Routledge. Lillis, T. and Curry, M.J. (2013) English, scientific publishing and participation in the global knowledge economy. In E.J. Erling and P. Seargeant (eds) English and Development: Policy, Pedagogy, and Globalization (pp. 220–242). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Lillis, T., Hewings, A., Vladimirou, D. and Curry, M.J. (2010) The geolinguistics of English as an academic lingua franca: Citation practices across English-medium national and English-medium international journals. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 20 (1), 111–135. Michels, C. and Schmoch, U. (2014) Impact of bibliometric studies on the publication behavior of authors. Scientometrics 98 (1), 369–385. Mongeon, P. and Paul-Hus, A. (2016) The journal coverage of Web of Science and Scopus: A comparative analysis. Scientometrics 106 (1), 213–228. Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions (2004) A Bibliometric Model for Performance-based Budgeting of Research Institutions. See http://www.uhr.no/ documents/Rapport_fra_UHR_prosjektet_4_11_engCJS_endelig_versjon_av_hele_ oversettelsen.pdf (accessed 17 April 2017). Nygaard, L.P. (2017) Publishing and perishing: An academic literacies framework for investigating research productivity. Studies in Higher Education 24 (3), 519–532. Ossenblok, T., Engels, T. and Sivertsen, G. (2012) The representation of the social sciences and humanities in the Web of Science: A comparison of publication patterns and incentive structures in Flanders and Norway (2005–9). Research Evaluation 21 (4), 280–290. Pansu, P., Dubois, N. and Beauvois, J.-L. (2013) Dis-moi qui te cite et je saurai ce que tu vaux. Que mesure vraiment la bibliométrie? [Tell Me Who You Cite, and I Will Know Your Value. What Do Bibliometrics Really Measure?]. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble. Piro, F.N., Aksnes, D.W. and Rørstad, K. (2013) A macro analysis of productivity differences across fields: Challenges of measurement of scientific publishing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 64 (2), 307–320. QS (2016) QS World University Rankings: Methodology. See http://www.topuniversities. com/qs-world-university-rankings/methodology (accessed 17 April 2017). Rice, C. (2013, Nov. 5) Do you make these 6 mistakes? A funding scheme that turns professors into typing monkeys. Science in Balance. Blog post. See http://curt-rice. com/2013/11/05/do-you-make-these-6-mistakes-a-funding-scheme-that-turnsprofessors-into-typing-monkeys/ (accessed 17 April 2017). Sandström, U. and Sandström, E. (2009) The field factor: Towards a metric for academic institutions. Research Evaluation 18 (3), 243–250. Schneider, J.W. (2009) An outline of the bibliometric indicator used for performancebased funding of research institutions in Norway. European Political Science 8, 364–378. Sivertsen, G. (2010) A performance indicator based on complete data for the scientific publication output at research institutions. ISSI Newsletter 6 (1), 22–28. Times Higher Education (2015) World University Rankings 2015–2016 methodology. See https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ranking-methodology-2016 (accessed 17 April 2017). Walters, W.H. (2014) Do article influence scores overestimate the citation impact of social science journals in subfields that are related to higher-impact natural science disciplines? Journal of Informetrics 8 (2), 421–430.

3 PhD Publication Requirements and Practices: A Multidisciplinary Case Study of a Hungarian University Robin L. Nagano and Edit Bukovszki Spiczéné

This chapter looks at the situation of doctoral students who must publish their research as part of the requirements for obtaining a doctoral degree – not only in their native language, but also in another language (typically English). These writers face a number of challenges. While not in the disadvantaged situation of many scholars in developing nations who lack access to even the most basic infrastructure (e.g. Salager-Meyer, 2008), resources and funding for education and research are still rather limited in central Europe compared to the situation in many other European Union member states – we might label their academic context ‘semi-peripheral’, in addition to being located outside of the Anglophone center (Curry & Lillis, 2004). Hungarian PhD students are learning how to approach, perform and write about research and to recognize and conform to the conventions and expectations of their disciplines in the local national language but are required to present their research findings in an additional language at the same time. We are interested in examining how novice researchers are initiated into their discourse communities, so we begin this chapter with an overview of the institutional requirements for publication. We also surveyed students to gain quantitative information on their publication patterns, choice of publication language and genre and sources of advice and support. A future phase of our research will include in-depth interviews and observation of the publication practices of novice authors as they progress through the doctoral program (and beyond), partly following the research methodology described in Lillis and Curry (2010). We hope to use this information in part to expand the range of support options available to doctoral students.

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The wider context for our research is academic text production, particularly in a non-native language (typically in English). We acknowledge that writing is context specific and highly influenced by disciplinary conventions, and that texts are products of collective social practices (Hyland, 2015). We focus on novice authors who are ‘learning the ropes’ of disciplinary discourse and publication. The ability to produce publishable academic texts is often acquired with difficulty, even in one’s own language, and even more so in a second or additional language (Duff, 2010). In Hungary, PhD degree requirements include producing both a bookstyle dissertation and journal publications. All Hungarian doctoral schools have publication requirements, as stated in the law (Act CCIV of 2011). Therefore, students must publish journal papers and conference proceedings papers while working on their dissertations. Publication of research in (at least) one foreign language is also mandatory, according to the Act. Foreign language proficiency, however, continues to be an issue in Hungary. Statistics show that 65% of Hungarians do not speak any foreign language, and despite considerable efforts, the situation is not improving (Eurobarometer, 2012). The most commonly taught language in Hungarian public and higher education institutions is English, followed at a distance by German (Hungarian Central Statistical Office [HCSO], 2010; Kurtán & Silye, 2012). The bachelor’s degree is only granted if a student possesses a certificate of proficiency in a foreign language at the intermediate level (B2 in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) or above. Many students lack this proficiency and thus are unable to receive their diplomas – in 2009, approximately one-quarter of students nationwide could not meet this criterion (HCSO, 2010). Entrance requirements for graduate courses are the same, but completion of the doctoral degree requires knowledge of a second foreign language at B2 level. The system of doctoral studies in Hungary typically consists of two main stages. After 2–3 years of coursework, conference presentations, publications and teaching (for students in full-time programs), students gain the needed points to reach the first barrier and acquire the pre-degree certificate known as the absolutorium. In the second main stage, the student formally becomes known as a doctoral candidate and has two years to submit and defend the dissertation. Publication (and other) requirements are set by the doctoral schools at more than one stage. Our study is based on data gathered from a Hungarian provincial university (referred to here as ‘Regional University’) that houses seven doctoral schools, with 232 students enrolled in 2015 (National Database of Doctoral Schools). In the first section of the chapter, we look at the university-level publication requirements for the doctoral degree and the variation among different doctoral schools at the university. This section is followed by our report on an empirical investigation of the publishing

PhD Publication Requirements and Practices

39

practices of PhD students in the university, examining publication patterns in terms of language and genre, as well as a discussion of sources of support for doctoral students in writing for publication.

Publication Requirements Publication requirements for doctoral students exist on two levels in Hungary: Each university has an overall set of regulations regarding doctoral training and procedures; beyond this, each doctoral school has its own set of regulations. The university-level regulations include a list of various publication genres: journal articles, conference proceedings, conference presentations without publication, book reviews, specialized translations, teaching materials and patents, which receive variable points. As shown in Table 3.1, the most highly valued publication (in terms of points awarded) is an article written in any foreign language and published in a refereed journal outside of Hungary. University regulations state that the minimum requirements for obtaining the doctoral degree related to publication are: • • •

27 points obtained from publications (15% of total points); at least one journal article published in Hungarian; at least one article published in an approved journal in a foreign language.

Table 3.1 Publication points for two genres Type

Status

Language

Place of publication

Journal articles

Refereed

Foreign language

Other country

9

Hungary

7

Conference proceedings papers

Points

Hungarian

NA

Nonrefereed

Foreign language

Other country

4.5

Hungary

3.5

Hungarian

NA

2

Refereed

Foreign language

Other country

7

Hungary

5

Nonrefereed

4

Hungarian

NA

Foreign language

Other country

3.5

Hungary

2.5

Hungarian

NA

Source: Doctoral Regulations of ‘Regional University’.

1

1

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Part 1: Evaluation Practices Shaping Academic Publishing

This minimum requirement is raised in several schools of the university. For example, the literary studies school requires eight publications by the point of submitting the dissertation, at least three of which must be in approved refereed journals; however, there is no explicit mention of required foreign language publication. The business school requires 35–54 points for the absolutorium, with publications in three different genres and at least one foreign language publication; for the PhD degree, there must be an additional two foreign language publications and one in Hungarian in an A- or B-ranked journal (selection is by a Hungarian Academy of Sciences committee in each discipline; see mta.hu). The computer science school requires four publications, two of which must be published in a foreign language in a refereed journal and one in a journal indexed in Scopus or Web of Science. The quality of the journal in which the article is published is considered in most schools, either by providing extra points for papers published in journals with impact factors or by requiring articles to be published in journals included in a list of journals ‘approved’ in the field (as shown in Table 3.2). The individual doctoral schools also display variation in terms of genres to be granted points. Some doctoral schools give points for books, chapters in books or edited books, and the school of business gives one point for the work of editing, reviewing or writing a foreword for an edited book. It also recognizes the publication of popular articles on research for the general public. The geoscience school offers points for producing documentation Table 3.2 Criteria for journal quality by doctoral school Doctoral school

Extra points

Approved journals

Geoscience

+2 for any journal with an impact factor

–

Materials Science

–

From own list of 135 journals

Mechanical Engineering

+3 to 5 for impact factor (decided by doctoral school committee)

–

Computer Science

–

Indexed in Scopus or Web of Science

Business

–

Own list for local journals+HASa list of local and international journals

Literary Science

–

HAS* list of local and international journals

Source: Regulations of doctoral schools at ‘Regional University’. a Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

PhD Publication Requirements and Practices

41

for software or devices. The mechanical engineering school offers points for research reports written with the student’s supervisor and allows a doctoral school committee to decide whether to award points for software, technical drawings, devices, equipment, etc. In addition, conference posters are recognized for points in some schools.

Methodology For this first phase of the research, we used qualitative (interview) and quantitative (questionnaire) data-collection methods. This type of approach is often called mixed-method research (Dörnyei, 2007). Interviews with six students in different doctoral schools were used to help create questions for the survey. Here we present only the survey findings (see Appendix for most relevant questions). Email messages containing a link to the online survey were sent to 232 Hungarian-language Regional University doctoral students using addresses obtained from the doctoral schools; 70 valid responses were received from PhD students in all 7 doctoral schools (for a response rate of 30%). Of the 70 respondents, 49 were full-time students and 21 part-time; there were 36 female and 34 male respondents; the average age of respondents was 32; and all were native speakers of Hungarian. Table 3.3 presents respondent numbers and proportion of students by doctoral school. Although the number of respondents was insufficient for comparing different doctoral schools, we were able to analyze the data by disciplinary group, comparing responses from the ‘hard’ sciences – material science, geosciences, mechanical engineering and computer science – with responses of students in the ‘soft’ sciences – business, law and literary studies. This system has some limitations, since disciplines are ranged along a scale with some being more on the soft side but merging into hard Table 3.3 Number of respondents by doctoral school (2015–2016 academic year) Doctoral school Geoscience

Respondents 6

Percentage of sample 8.57

Materials Science

5

7.14

Mechanical Engineering

10

14.29

Computer Science

8

11.43

Hard sciences

29

41.43

Law

15

21.43

Business

19

27.14

Literary Science

7

10.00

Soft sciences

41

58.57

Total (n)

70

100

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Part 1: Evaluation Practices Shaping Academic Publishing

(e.g. economics) (see Hyland, 2000), but it provides a useful approach for analyzing the data and identifying potential differences in disciplinary cultures (Becher & Trowler, 2001). In addition to data about the doctoral studies of respondents, we collected information on their publications in the local language (L1), in English (as an additional language, EAL) and in other languages, on the presubmission feedback they received and on writing instruction.

Survey Results Disciplinary groups show some differences in publication patterns. In general, more research publications were reported in the hard science group, especially in the category of journal articles in English. In both groups, Hungarian publications led the list, followed by English, with only a handful of papers published in other languages. Respondents were asked to record the number of their publications in various categories recognized by the publication requirements. The three most common categories were refereed journal article, non-refereed journal article and conference proceedings, as presented in Table 3.4.

Table 3.4 Number of research publications reported for journal articles and conference papers (as a share of publications for the group) Language Hungarian

English

Other language

Totals

Genre

Hard sciences n=29 (%)

Soft sciences n=41(%)

Totals n=70

Journal article (refereed)

46

(15.7) 52

(18.6)

98

Journal article (non-refereed)

25

(8.5)

34

(12.2)

59

Conference paper

111

(37.9)

108

(38.7) 219

Journal article (refereed)

42

(14.3) 9

(3.2)

51

Journal article (non-refereed)

5

(1.7)

(0.7)

7

Conference paper

62

(21.2) 65

(23.3)

127

Journal article (refereed)

0

(0)

2

(0.7)

2

Journal article (non-refereed)

0

(0)

1

(0.4)

1

Conference paper

2

(0.7)

6

(2.1)

8

293

2

279

572

Total by language 367

185

14

PhD Publication Requirements and Practices

43

Of the reported conference and journal publications, the average number of publications per person came to 10.1 for the hard science group and 6.8 in the soft sciences. Publication in Hungarian amounted to 62% of the hard science publications and 69% of the soft sciences. As for second language (L2) publications, the hard science publications were almost exclusively in English (with one conference paper each in German and Romanian), while the soft science students (especially law students) had a higher number of publications in an L2 other than English (all in German). Conference publications are more common in all languages. The main difference between the groups is in the number of journal articles in English, which is over four times higher for hard science students than for soft. Of the soft science conference papers, 80% were published by students in the business school. Among publications, conference papers and journal articles dominate in both groups, but other genres vary among schools. Those reported by respondents are listed in Table 3.5. There were differences in the proportion of single-author to co-authored papers between the two disciplinary groups. Respondents in the hard sciences wrote around 40% of their publications on their own; the rest were produced with co-authors (in about two-thirds, the student was the first author). In the soft sciences, about 80% of their publications were written on their own, and about a third of the students were first authors. Once students have written a manuscript, they turn to a range of people for feedback on their texts (although around 20% of the soft science respondents reported having papers that were not checked by anyone). Supervisors, acting as academic brokers (Lillis & Curry, 2006, 2010), are the main source of feedback on content: For the hard sciences, supervisor feedback on the content was obtained by 97% of respondents for Hungarian texts and 90% for L2 texts. In the soft sciences, this figure stands at 78% and 59%, respectively. In the hard sciences, supervisors tend to comment on language use in both L1 and L2, while this is not true for many of the social science supervisors. The assistance of colleagues and other people increases for L2 papers compared to Table 3.5 Other genres produced by respondents, by doctoral school Material Sciences Teaching aids, conference posters

Mechanical Engineering Conference abstracts, presentations, posters

Law Specialized translations, abstracts, reports on conferences

Business

Literary Studies

PhD forum Research proceedings reports, book reviews, teaching aids, articles for general public

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L1. Other PhD students play only a minor role in commenting on content but are active in checking language use and style. Others consulted included language teachers and professional proofreaders, but more often friends who know the language. Many students compose L2 papers directly in the target language (hard sciences, 59%; soft sciences, 46%), but a significant proportion compose in L1 and translate, either by themselves (45% and 49%, respectively) or with the help of others (14% and 20%, respectively). Just a few students reported having a professional do the translation.

Discussion Our analysis of the documentary policy data shows that foreign language publications are always given higher points than publications written in Hungarian. This reflects the situation discussed in Curry and Lillis (2004) and Lillis and Curry (2010) for two central European and two southern European contexts; publications in an L2 are recognized as more valuable for earning degrees (including post-doctoral degrees), promotion, membership in academies of science and scholarship and grant applications. This situation presumably reflects the larger potential audience of a foreign language publication and may also be a way of recognizing the greater effort and time that often goes into attaining publication in an L2 (see Hanauer & Englander, 2011). However, such policies may have the effect of demeaning publication in the national language, implying that local journals are a less valuable means of disseminating research results. Such an attitude has potentially negative consequences for the advancement of research in a nation. Firstly, it penalizes those whose research topics are closely connected to the language, culture, history or other contexts of a nation and thus of less interest to an international audience (e.g. Duzsak & Lewkowicz, 2008; Kuteeva & Airey, 2014). Secondly, it has the potential effect of hindering academic work in the national language; in Sweden, for instance, decades of English-medium instruction have led to domain loss – the lack of technical terms in the disciplines – and fewer and fewer resources in these area are available in the national language (Kuteeva & Airey, 2014). Several authors have mentioned a decline in the number of scholarly journals published in national languages, for instance in Romania (Muresan & Pérez-Llantada, 2014) and Spain (Martin et al., 2014). On the other hand, Lillis and Curry (2010) point out that communication of research in the national language – to academic and general audiences – is also valuable for a scholar to become known as an expert in the local research community and to disseminate knowledge more broadly. Choice of publication language therefore implies a choice of target audience. The publication requirements of the doctoral schools of Regional University seem to reflect an expectation that the typical audience for a doctoral student’s research work will usually be found locally.

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The language choice of our respondents differs from the publication practices of Hungarian scholars identified by Medgyes and László (2001), however, in which nearly two-thirds of publications in the hard sciences were in English, followed by Hungarian, with about 6% in another language, compared to about two-thirds in Hungarian, 20% in English and 12% in another language for scholars in the soft sciences. The 15 Hungarian soft science scholars studied in Lillis and Curry (2010) showed wide individual variation in the choice of language, and a few published in three or more languages. It seems possible that the novice status of the doctoral students partly explains the difference – publication in the native language is often the first step in initiation to the local discourse community, working toward membership in the wider community. The soft science preference for publication in the L1 is reminiscent of the study by Flowerdew and Li (2009), where Chinese academics in the social sciences and humanities mainly published in Chinese, and many saw English publication as irrelevant or out of reach (mostly due to language barriers). Some factors documented for Hungarian scholars behind choice of language include the journal impact factor, their personal career goals, their involvement in international scientific networking, their desire to maintain the academic register of their national language and to contribute to the local academic community, and their fear of rejection (Medgyes & László, 2001). The genres in which scholars published also tended to differ by language (Lillis & Curry, 2010; Medgyes & László, 2001). In the situation under study here, it seems likely that meeting the PhD publication requirements is a major factor in choice of language and genre. Studies have shown that the supervisor is a major factor in the research performance of students (measured mainly in publications) (Gu et al., 2011; Lei & Hu, 2015); our data confirm the major role played by the supervisor in providing feedback. Students appear to build support networks mainly from supervisors, colleagues and peers. Our results show that the intervention of literacy brokers (Lillis & Curry, 2006) such as language professionals in the publication practices of doctoral students – at the pre-submission stage, at least – is not typical. Direct instruction in academic writing also appears to be limited, which is in line with earlier findings that explicit instruction in writing is still rare in central and eastern Europe (Harbord, 2010). While over half of the students we surveyed had had no training in academic writing in any language, they felt it would be useful to have such opportunities. There appears to be a need to increase ‘metadiscursive support’ (Duff, 2010: 187) to aid novice scholars in gaining the ability to produce publishable texts. To aid EAL authors in particular, it might be helpful to make proofreading/editing services available, or for experienced faculty members to coach groups of students through article writing (see, e.g. Corcoran, this volume). Especially in the social sciences and humanities,

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where foreign language journal publication levels are low, it might also be worth following the approach of Casanave (2010), offering a chance for students to publish in a relatively protected environment (a doctoral school publication or proceedings of a local conference) while providing scaffolding for producing an L2 article. Several possibilities exist for increasing the amount of writing support, with a particular focus on English for Research Publication Purposes (see, e.g. Aitchison et al., 2010; Curry & Lillis, 2013): establishing a writing center or other systems to provide help with editing (see Matarese, 2013); offering writing courses within doctoral schools, such as the blended learning course described in Gruber (2012) (see also Huang, this volume); organizing writing groups (Aitchison & Guerin, 2014; see also Abdulatief and Guzula, this volume); or training doctoral supervisors, who can then pass on the knowledge and skills to students (Rienecker & Jørgensen, 2012). Whatever support is offered, McGrail et al. (2006) recommend assessing its effect on publication rates.

Conclusion As this early stage study shows, Hungarian doctoral students are expected to be able to conduct research that is publishable on an international level and communicate it in a foreign language in order to gain the doctoral degree. The publication points available demonstrate the value placed on foreign language publication, but our survey results show that the bulk of student publications are in the local national language. Several differences were noted between publication patterns of PhD students in the hard and soft sciences within the university. These preliminary findings have implications for pedagogy and policy, raising questions such as the following: Considering the differences in publishing practices between the hard and soft sciences, does it make sense to offer the same services to all students, regardless of discipline? What supports would students benefit from most at the beginning of their doctoral studies and at later stages? How can opportunities for instruction be made available to all, including part-time students? The survey results have raised a number of issues rather than providing firm answers. More information is needed about factors involved in language choice, obstacles encountered by novice writers in the publication process and student plans for meeting the publication requirements. Changes have been recently announced in the national doctoral system; how these modifications will affect publication requirements is unclear. If the new system leads to more emphasis on active supervision and accountability for student progress, then this may be an optimal time to introduce further systems to support doctoral students’ publication efforts.

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Acknowledgment Many thanks to Beatrix Kerekesné Bozso for her help with the survey.

References Act CCIV of 2011 on National Higher Education (Hungary). See http://net.jogtar.hu/jr/ gen/hjegy_doc.cgi?docid=A1100204.TV. Aitchison, C. and Guerin, C. (eds) (2014) Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond: Innovations in Practice and Theory. London/New York: Routledge. Aitchison, C., Kamler, B. and Lee, A. (eds) (2010) Publishing Pedagogies for the Doctorate and Beyond. Oxford/New York: Routledge. Becher, T. and Trowler, P.R. (2001) Academic Tribes and Territories (2nd edn). Buckingham: Open University Press. Casanave, C.P. (2010) Dovetailing under impossible circumstances. In C. Aitchison, B. Kamler and A. Lee (eds) Publishing Pedagogies for the Doctorate and Beyond (pp. 47–63). Oxford/New York: Routledge. Curry, M.J. and Lillis, T. (2004) Multilingual scholars and the imperative to publish in English: Negotiating interests, demands, and rewards. TESOL Quarterly 38 (4), 663–688. Curry, M.J. and Lillis, T. (2013) A Scholar’s Guide to Getting Published in English: Critical Choices and Practical Strategies. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Dörnyei, Z. (2007) Research Methods in Applied Linguistics: Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Methodologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duff, P.A. (2010) Language socialization into academic discourse communities. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 30, 169–192. Duzsak, A. and Lewkowicz, J. (2008) Publishing academic texts in English: A Polish perspective. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7, 108–120. Eurobarometer (2012) Europeans and their languages (Special Eurobarometer 386). See http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_386_en.pdf. Flowerdew, J. and Li, Y. (2009) English or Chinese? The trade-off between local and international publication among Chinese academics in the humanities and social sciences. Journal of Second Language Writing 18, 1–16. Gruber, H. (2012) The academic writing research group at the University of Vienna. In C. Thaiss, G. Bräuer, P. Carlino, L. Ganobcsik-Williams and A. Sinha (eds) Writing Programs Worldwide: Profiles of Academic Writing in Many Places (pp. 79–91). Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. Gu, J., Lin, Y., Vogel, D. and Tian, W. (2011) What are the major impact factors on research performance of young doctorate holders in Science in China: A USTC survey. Higher Education 62, 483–502. Hanauer, D.I. and Englander, K. (2011) Quantifying the burden of writing research articles in a second language: Data from Mexican scientists. Written Communication 28 (4), 403–316. Harbord, J. (2010) Writing in Central and Eastern Europe: Stakeholders and directions in initiating change. Across the Disciplines 7. See http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/articles/ harbord2010.cfm. Hungarian Central Statistical Office (2010) Idegennyelv-tanulás [Foreign language learning]. Statisztikai tükör 4 (62), 1–2. Hyland, K. (2000) Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. Harlow: Pearson Education.

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Hyland, K. (2015) Academic Publishing: Issues and Challenges in the Construction of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kurtán, Z. and Silye, M. (2012) A felsőoktatásban folyó nyelvi és szaknyelvi képzések [Language and LSP Courses in Higher Education]. Budapest: Hungarian Institute for Educational Research and Development. Kuteeva, M. and Airey, J. (2014) Disciplinary differences in the use of English in higher education: Reflections on recent language policy developments. Higher Education 67, 533–549. Lei, J. and Hu, G. (2015) Apprenticeship in scholarly publishing: A student perspective on doctoral supervisor’s roles. Publications 3, 27–42. Lillis, T. and Curry, M.J. (2006) Professional academic writing by multilingual scholars: Interactions with literacy brokers in the production of English-medium texts. Written Communication 23 (1), 3–35. Lillis, T. and Curry, M.J. (2010) Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English. London: Routledge. Martin, P., Rey-Rocha, J., Burgess, S. and Moreno, A.I. (2014) Publishing research in English-language journals: Attitudes, strategies and difficulties of multilingual scholars of medicine. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 16, 57–67. Matarese, V. (ed.) (2013) Supporting Research Writing: Roles and Challenges in Multilingual Settings. Oxford: Chandos Publishing. McGrail, M.R., Rickard, C.M. and Jones, R. (2006) Publish or perish: A systematic review of interventions to increase academic publication rates. Higher Education Research and Development 25 (1), 19–35. Medgyes, P. and László, M. (2001) The foreign language competence of Hungarian scholars: Ten years later. In U. Ammon (ed.) The Dominance of English as a Language of Science (pp. 261–286). Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Muresan, L-M. and Pérez-Llantada, C. (2014) English for research publication and dissemination in bi-/multiliterate environments: The case of Romanian academics. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 13, 53–64. National Database of Doctoral Schools (Hungary) (n.d.) See http://www.doktori.hu (accessed 15 October 2015). Rienecker, L. and Jørgensen, P.S. (2012) From working with students to working through faculty: A genre-centered focus to writing development. In C. Thaiss, G. Bräuer, P. Carlino, L. Ganobcsik-Williams and A. Sinha (eds) Writing Programs Worldwide: Profiles of Academic Writing in Many Places (pp. 169–180). Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. Salager-Meyer, F. (2008) Scientific publishing in developing countries: Challenges for the future. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7, 121–132.

Appendix: Selected Questions from Questionnaire Survey • • •

Please write the number of published items in each category at the present time. Include all items that qualify under the rules of your doctoral school. Are/were you able to attend any courses dealing with publishing and/or academic writing/presenting? Have you had the opportunity to learn about academic writing/ presenting in a foreign language?

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• •

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Who checks the content of your papers/presentations written in a foreign language (before submission)? Who checks the language use of your papers/presentations written in a foreign language (before submission)?

4 Chinese Business Schools Pursuing Growth through International Publishing: Evidence from Institutional Genres Yongyan Li and Rui Yang

An online job advertisement of the School of Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, aiming to attract applicants from home and abroad, declares: ‘The School plans to grow aggressively in the next several years, and therefore starting dates are flexible. Ranks are open, and salaries are competitive’. The fact that this advertisement is written in English and posted by one of the top-ranking business schools in China,1 affiliated to a prestigious university, is telling. Underlying the advertisement is a broader trend characterizing the general Chinese business schools (hereafter CBSs): that they aim to ‘grow aggressively’ and those academics who can publish in English medium Anglo-American journals are considered important agents in this growth and are sought after with high salaries. To tap into the voices of CBSs, in this chapter, we report a study that analyzed a collection of institutional texts originating from a range of high-ranking CBSs to demonstrate how these schools are pursuing growth through international publication and, in doing so, categorize academics in light of their presumed chances of contributing to this enterprise. It is significant to examine the case of CBSs. The first reason has to do with the prominent connection between business schools and the global economy so that, compared with their counterparts in other social science disciplines, business schools around the world have been in the avant garde in striving for international standards in teaching and research and, accordingly, have been following a ranking regime on a global scale (Wedlin, 2007). Business schools are obsessed with ranking (particularly, that of the schools and of journals), which parallels their institutional

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status: As Tourish (2011: 369) put it, ‘as cash cows in many institutions, business programs are subject to penal levels of classification, comparison and rankings’. The elite members among CBSs, such as the Top 10 named by Forbes China (Flannery & Chen, 2010), have been actively participating in this ranking race. The drive toward international publishing is an instrumental part of this race toward higher ranking and higher esteem at regional and international levels. Academics at CBSs, like their counterparts in European countries who publish overwhelmingly in English (Anderson, 2013; Tietze, 2008), are probably under greater pressure to produce English medium publications in Western journals than their colleagues in other social science disciplines; indeed, they have been consistently taking the lead amongst Chinese social scientists in terms of the international publication output (Institute of Science & Technology Information of China [ISTIC], 2013, 2014). Understanding how CBSs operate in the ranking regime by promoting international publication provides a useful reference point for studying a broader range of disciplines and contexts. The second reason that CBSs are worth looking into is that the social science disciplines affiliated to a CBS are prominently influenced by additional forces, apart from being driven by the ranking regime. On the one hand, largely under the leadership of overseas-trained academics (here defined as those who have received PhD degrees outside mainland China), the softer disciplines of these schools, specifically business management and organizational studies, have displayed strong self-reflexivity, which has sustained an across-the-board endeavor to transform Chinese business research from a traditional, empirically weak paradigm to a scientific, empirically robust paradigm that meets international standards (Li, 2014a). This commitment, while echoing a Westernization movement in Chinese social sciences that dated to the early twentieth century, has fostered a worship of English-medium Western journals that presumably model rigorous empirical research. Such a stance is particularly visible amongst overseas-trained academics (Li, 2014a; Li & Hu, 2017). Yet at the same time, as an antithesis to Westernization, concerns with indigenization and local relevance have been part of the overall scholarly pursuits at CBSs, as in other social sciences in China (R. Yang, 2013). More recently, calls made by a group of overseas-based Chinese ethnic scholars for Chinese scholars making theoretical contributions to the international scholarship through rigorous, contextualized research in China (e.g. Leung, 2009; Tsui, 2009) have been widely influential. CBSs’ overall long-term commitment is thus aligned with the current national policy that encourages Chinese social sciences and humanities to assume an ‘import–export orientation’ in ‘going out’ (Feng et al., 2013; R. Yang, 2013). From this perspective, CBSs pursuing growth through international publication are interesting to observe, for in the longer term, their practices are likely to offer evidence of Chinese

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scholars working to renegotiate the current conditions under which global knowledge is produced and disseminated.

Previous Research In recent years, researchers concerned with the impact of the demands of international publication on the lives of scholars who use English as an additional language (EAL) have examined institutional documents that specify publication requirements and the criteria for promotion in relation to the ranking of journals and have explicitly sought to establish connections between institutional policies and academics’ publishing practices. Lillis and Curry (2010) analyzed institutional evaluation documents adopted at several central/southern European universities to demonstrate how academics’ productivity is quantified and measured by publications, with English medium publications in Anglo-American journals accruing the greatest amount of ‘social capital’ (Bourdieu, 1998). Anderson’s (2013) study of the publication practices of 157 early career mobile academics, based on their publication records and interviews with 24 of them, revealed that the effects of national and EU-level policies on the academics’ publication practices in terms of language choices and strategies were mediated by their disciplinary identities and life trajectories. Englander and Uzuner-Smith (2013: 232) examined how the discourse of globalization is manifested in an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report and how this discourse with its ‘logic and values’ was appropriated at national and institutional levels, as seen through some policy documents gathered at universities in Turkey and Mexico. Lee and Lee (2013), based on an analysis of a publication policy for tenure-track professorial staff and interviews with faculty at a South Korean university, argued that the imperative to publish in international indexed journals profoundly impacts upon the professors’ academic lives and Korean scholarship. Finally, Feng et al. (2013: 267) likewise combined policy analysis with interviews to illustrate ‘Chinese academia’s quandary in internationalization’ by privileging Anglo-American indexes such as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) on the one hand and pursuing ‘going out’ oriented to gaining greater ‘discourse power’ (Feng et al., 2013: 256) for Chinese scholarship on the other. In exploring the ideologies behind the policies concerning publication and assessment, these researchers have drawn upon a variety of theoretical perspectives to illuminate their research focus. For instance, Anderson (2013: 275) adopted a sociological life-course approach (Wingens et al., 2011) to take ‘the individual in longitudinal perspective as the primary unit of analysis’; Englander and Uzuner-Smith (2013) employed the concept of ‘figured worlds’ (Holland et al., 1998) to examine how academia, as a ‘figured world’, values certain activities over others; while Lee and Lee

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(2013) showed how the ideology of neoliberalism (e.g. Spring, 2008) underlies institutional policies whereby performance is measured by publication. Our study reported in this chapter examined a range of genres found at CBSs to reveal how they positioned international publication and academics, a focus that is also linked to our theoretical background.

Theoretical Background In this study, we took an activity-oriented rhetorical genre theory perspective with a critical edge to examine a sample of texts originating from some CBSs as genres-in-use that mediate academics’ activity space. Such a perspective considers North American rhetorical genre theory (e.g. Freedman & Medway, 1994) in a Vygotskyian activity theory frame (Vygotsky, 1978), as illustrated by Bazerman (1988, 2004) and Russell (1997). According to rhetorical genre theory, genres are ‘typified’ social actions that respond to recurrent rhetorical situations (Miller, 1994). The creation of genres starts with members of a collective jointly recognizing ‘an objectified social need’ or ‘exigence’ (Miller, 1994: 26), which has been socially constructed and recognized as requiring a rhetorical response. For CBSs, as depicted above, such exigence resides in the pressure to both follow international standards in conducting and publishing research and to participate in the regime of ranking to enhance their status and visibility. The exigence creates a rhetorical situation for CBSs characterized by ‘isomorphism’ (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) in what is considered appropriate discursive reactions. Accordingly, a potentially similar range of policy documents and related administrative texts have been created at CBSs in recent years to embody the discursive reactions. These documents, genrified as regulations, policies, reports, job advertisements, journal lists, etc., enter into complex systems of genres that coordinate the work of CBSs, link the social worlds of the participants and, importantly, mediate the activity space of academics. In light of critical perspectives in rhetorical genre theory (e.g. Coe et al., 2002), genres carry ‘ideological and socializing forces’ (Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010: 149) and coordinate the work of groups and organizations through creating particular ‘social facts’ or ‘those things people believe to be true’ (Bazerman, 2004: 312). Social facts bear on a ‘social understanding’ that the speaker/writer has the ‘legitimate authority’ to define the situation and bear on what is actually said or written (Bazerman, 2004: 312). At CBSs, the deans and the management staff, who enjoy the authority socially and historically accorded to them, collectively produce the institutional documents that encode and sustain particular social facts. While empirical research on social facts can evoke ‘methodological concerns of sociology, anthropology, and linguistics’, it is possible to have a modest analytical

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focus such as that on the level of genre (Bazerman, 2004: 320). Social facts ‘consist of meaningful social actions being accomplished through language or speech acts’ (Bazerman, 2004: 311). In our study, methodologically we approach such speech acts, or rather, social actions, through forms of content analysis rather than adopting the traditional speech-act analysis that focuses on understanding the functions of spoken utterances (e.g. Searle, 1979). A critical orientation in rhetorical genre theory urges us to probe issues of power and ask ‘for whom does [a genre] work?’ (Coe et al., 2002: 4). In the performance-based assessment culture, we need to query the power of the institutional genres of CBSs and examine whom they privilege or exclude. Sousa et al. (2010: 1440) observe that ‘a focus on performance implies such concepts as effectiveness in light of explicated objectives, productivity defined as efficient resource use, and selection mechanisms to sort researchers and research groups according to their effectiveness and productivity’. In the activity systems of CBSs, institutional genres, other than constructing social facts surrounding publishing in international journals, would also construct social facts around the selection and sorting of the academics ‘according to their effectiveness and productivity’ in the publication race, to regulate and mediate academics’ lives or activity space. Our study thus aimed to illuminate these two types of social facts.

Research Methods Data collection In gathering documents for our study, we began with a list of target business schools that included the first 15 schools under the category of Business Management in the latest version of China Discipline Ranking (CDR) (2012), and another three from the C9 League (the other six in the C9 League were included in the earlier 15).2 The target business schools also covered all Top 10 ‘Business Management Research Powers in China’s Higher Education’, a ranking released by China Enterprise Management Research Association (Huai, 2006) and all seven university-affiliated schools in the Top 10 Business Schools in China named by Forbes China (Flannery & Chen, 2010). We searched through the websites of these schools as well as through baidu.com (the largest online search engine in China), using the Chinese equivalents of such keywords as ‘international publication’, ‘English paper publication’, ‘recruitment’, ‘research assessment’ and ‘reward policies’. After filtering the gathered texts, we had 27 texts left that could help us answer our research questions. To this pool, we added two lists of tiered international journals gathered from two schools in an earlier study (Li, 2014a) and a document, ‘Regulations on monetary reward for publications’, from one of the schools. Thus we had 30 texts in our collection, gathered

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between May and December 2015, except for the journal lists added from an earlier study. These documents were released by 17 business schools (referred to here as S1–S17, as shown in the Appendix) in 13 cities across mainland China, although a good number of these schools are housed in universities in Beijing and Shanghai, major cities that are home to some top Chinese universities. In categorizing these 30 documents into genres, we considered their distinctive features as reflected in their titles and structures, as well as the kinds of institutional activities they mediate as reflected in content and specific wordings (Bazerman, 2004). As shown in Table 4.1, the 30 documents included five genres.3

Data analysis We saved our collection of texts separately in .txt files (journal lists not included in this step) and built a corpus (dominated by Chinese texts but with a few English texts of job advertisements, as indicated in Table 4.1), which was searchable in AntConc (Anthony, 2014), a freely downloadable Table 4.1 Thirty documents gathered from 17 Chinese business schools Genres 1

Job advertisement (with or without details of different categories of posts)

2

Responsibilities and assessment criteria of different categories of academic posts Regulations on monetary reward for publications Report on the publication achievement of a School (with or without an English publication list appended) Lists of international journals (as a stand-alone document or embedded in a larger document)

3 4

5

Schools of origin

Number of documents

S1 (1C & 1E); S2 (1C); S3 (1C & 2E); S5 (1E); S6 (1C); S8 (1C); S9 (2C & 1E); S10 (1C); S12 (1 C&E bilingual); S14 (1 C&E bilingual); S15 (1E); and S16 (1C) S5 (1C) and S7 (1C)

17

S11 (1C)

1

S4 (1C), S6 (2C), S11 (1C) and S17 (1C)

5

S5 (1), S8 (1), S9 (1), S11 (1) and S13 (1)

5

2

Note: In each category, the number of documents gathered from relevant schools is indicated together with their linguistic medium (‘C’ stands for Chinese and ‘E’ for English). Twenty of the documents were released between 2011 and 2015, and 10 were undated.

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corpus tool. Our content analysis began with identifying the expressions (in both Chinese and English) in the corpus that conveyed the notion of publishing in international journals, such as ‘international * journals’, ‘top * journals’, ‘overseas * journals’ and ‘international * papers’ (wildcard symbol * indicating possible intervening words). We then searched the corpus for these expressions. A total of 67 hits, displayed in the form of concordances or keywords-in-context (KWIC) (Fielding & Lee, 1998), was generated.4 We clicked on each concordance line to see a larger context and copied all stretches of language in the concordances, along with relevant context. We thus had a collection of instances on which to conduct a form of ‘definitional content analysis’ (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004: 335). This was done through inductive descriptive coding in NVivo, with the units of analysis being ‘information units’ (Norton, 2009: 124), defined here as stretches of language that both contained the target expressions and performed discrete ‘meaningful social actions’ that constituted ‘social facts’ (Bazerman, 2004: 311), for example: Positions of Professors: should have first-class academic progress in international or domestic advanced research. // Be able to continue publishing articles in international or domestic top-tier journals. (S12 job advertisement) In our analysis, this extract contains two information units (demarcation indicated by //): the first we coded as ‘Stating appointment conditions in terms of past achievement in international publication’ and the second as ‘Stating position responsibility in terms of publishing in international journals’. Both were subsumed under a group of ‘social facts’ labeled as ‘International publication and job application’. Our coding led to the distinction between three groups of social facts constructed by our sample of CBSs around publishing in international journals: international publication and job application, international publication and assessment requirements and international publication and the achievements of a school. To tease out the social facts surrounding the selection and sorting mechanisms applied to academics in light of ‘their effectiveness and productivity’ (Sousa et al., 2010: 1440), we adopted a holistic approach, querying the ‘ideological “workings”’ (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004: 342) of the genres by asking such sensitizing questions as: What assumptions are held in the texts about academics? How will the social facts created in the texts impact upon different academics’ career differently, including having an exclusionary effect on some? And, how might academics, as the primary audience of the text, respond to the texts? In our final analysis, we summarized the social facts of sorting mechanisms applied to academics into four types of strategies or ‘social

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actions’ (Bazerman, 2004: 311): privileging job applicants with overseas backgrounds, labeling levels and categories of posts, limiting and excluding by age, and incentivizing through differentiated monetary rewards.

Findings5 Social facts about publishing in international journals The three groups of social facts constructed by our corpus of CBS documents involved a total of 67 information units, as summarized in Table 4.2.

Table 4.2 Social facts constructed by CBSs about publishing in international journals International publication and job application (30) •

Stating appointment conditions in terms of past achievement in international publication (16)

•

Stating position responsibility in terms of publishing in international journals (10)

•

Stating requirement for applicants to have the potential or capacity to publish in high-level international journals (4) International publication and assessment requirements (18)

•

Stipulating how international publication contributes to points or rating (8)

•

Stating position responsibility in a Talent Scheme in terms of publishing in international journals (4)

•

Stating condition to enter a Talent Scheme in terms of past achievement in international publication or having the potential to publish in international journals (4)

•

Stating the journals’ different weighting in assessment or reward granting (2) International publication and the achievements of a school (19)

• Reviewing/celebrating achievements over a period of time (12) •

Announcing publication or acceptance in international top-tier journals (3)

•

Expressing aspiration to publish in first-class international journals (1)

•

Profiling top journals (and indirectly promoting the achievements of the school) (3)

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International publication and job application Six schools specified in their job advertisements that an ‘appointment condition’ was to have published in international journals (S1, S2, S3, S5, S8 and S9). S3 stated ‘We need two professors ranking from assistant professor to full professor’ with ‘academic excellence’ ‘demonstrated through a strong record of publications in international peer-reviewed journals’. The other five schools stated such a requirement for applicants to positions of associate professor or professor. S1 noted ‘Applicants to positions higher than assistant professor should have published high-quality research in top management journals’. In its ‘Policy for attracting overseas excellent talents’, S8 asked applicants to the post of ‘Leading Talents in the Discipline and of Academic Leader’ to ‘have published in international top-tier SSCI and SCI journals as first or corresponding author’. Likewise, S9 expected applicants to its positions of professor or associate professor to have published ‘academic papers with high rates citation in SSCI’ or ‘a monograph in English with an overseas well-known publisher’. Four schools’ job advertisements stipulated bluntly in relation to specific ranks of post that publishing in international journals is a ‘position responsibility’ (S8, S12, S14 and S16), that is, it is what academics are expected to do after taking the posts. S12 stated that the candidates for professor ‘should have first-class academic progress in international or domestic advanced research’ and are ‘able to continue publishing articles in international or domestic top-tier journals’. S14’s position requirement for publication was the same for the three types of positions (Professor of Special Appointment I, Professor of Special Appointment II and Faculty of Core Post): Publishing international academic papers of advanced influence with the Hunan University Business School as the first author or corresponding author’s employment institution. At S8, ‘Overseas Outstanding Young Talents’, one of the three categories of talents it aimed to attract, will be assessed during the three-year ‘contract period’ based on their accomplishments in international publication, with no other criterion indicated: Papers published or accepted for publication during the contract period should meet one of the following conditions: One paper published in an international top-tier journal; or no less than two papers published in international Tier-A journals; or one paper published in an international Tier-A journal and two papers in a Tier-B journal. Finally, four schools also mentioned the requirement for applicants to have ‘the potential or capacity’ to publish in high-level international journals (S3, S12, S14 and S15). For instance, S12 stated for the position of associate

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professor: ‘Have potential in publishing articles in international or domestic top-tier journals’. Of these four, as noted above, S3 also stipulated international publication as an appointment condition, while S12 and S14 indicated publishing in international journals as a position responsibility. Clearly, while the term ‘potential’ has a hedging effect, it may actually imply a position requirement, that is, the applicants, once recruited to fill the positions, would be expected to (continue to) publish in international journals.

International publication and assessment requirements Like some schools’ job advertisements, S5 stated its condition to enter a Talent Scheme6 (applying to existing and newly employed academics) in terms of past achievements in international publications or the potential to publish in international journals: that the applicants to the three levels of the scheme (A, B and C) should have published more than one Tier-A article, more than two Tier-B articles and more than one Tier-B article, respectively; while PhD graduates or post-doc fellows who graduated from ‘overseas well-known universities’ should have the ‘potential’ to publish, all in international journals ‘recognized by the School’ – which implies a role of designated journal lists, as we discuss below. Also, like some schools spelling out in job advertisements that international publication is a position responsibility, S5 stipulated that during the four-year ‘contract’ of the Talent Scheme, Level A staff should ‘publish more than one Tier-A article’, Level B staff should ‘publish more than three Tier-B articles’ and Level C staff should ‘published more than two Tier-B articles’. Referred to as a ‘contract’, the Scheme implies privilege, which in turn justifies a sanction component: While the fulfillment of all the specified requirements (in both teaching and research) can lead to the extension of one’s contract in the scheme or promotion to a higher-level post, failure on full completion of the requirements would mean that one should leave the scheme, not be allowed to re-apply within three years and lose eligibility to re-apply if unfulfillment occurs twice. In S7’s ‘performance assessment criteria’ (review period unspecified) for three categories of posts, A, B and C (the latter two with further subcategories), international publication contributes to the fulfillment of the ‘research’ component. For Category A staff, for example, ‘research’ is given 20 points (‘research projects’ are given another 15 points); one gets 60%– 80% of the 20 points by publishing two articles in overseas Tier-C journals and domestic Tier-B journals and 80%–100% of points by publishing one paper in an overseas Tier-B journal or a domestic Tier-A journal – a rule that implies inequality between domestic and overseas journals, that is, the former are equivalent to the latter at one tier lower. A ‘special rule’ stipulates that one in any category of post can be automatically rated ‘Excellent’ in overall assessment by publishing a paper in an international Tier-A journal, as long as one meets other ‘basic requirements’.

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Clearly, the assessment requirements shown above hinge upon the social fact that journals are tiered. The five lists of international journals in our collection comprise journals listed by tiers, with those in S11’s list including the impact factors of the journals in a recent year and their five-year impact factors. Other than these lists of journals, the social facts of the ranking system of international journals are reiterated in the rest of the texts, with the use of such phrases as ‘international top-tier’, ‘international first-class’ and ‘international Tier A/B/C’. The ‘top-tier’, ‘first-class’ and ‘Tier A’ journals are valued highly. Two information units in our corpus pointed to the different weighting of different tiers of journals in assessment: The papers published in international journals include four levels: Zone I, Zone II, Zone III and Zone IV. (S11) One paper published in an international Tier A journal can be regarded as equivalent to three papers published in international Tier B journals during assessment. (S5)

International publication and the achievements of a school The five reports on the publication achievement of schools in our collection projected academics’ achievement in publication as a laudable achievement of the schools. Most of the relevant information units in the data were about reviewing or celebrating international publication achievements over a period of time. Thus we found: In the past five years, professors of the Guanghua School of Management published a total of 21 papers in international Tier A journals. (S6) In the past two years, at least four academics in applied economics have published papers in international first-class economics journals. (S3) Between January and May, 2013, quite a number of teachers in our school published papers in overseas first-class and domestic first-class journals. This is an inspiring achievement. (S4) A few information units announced publication or acceptance in international top-tier journals as news: A paper by Prof X at the Guanghua School of Management published in international top-tier journals. (S6) Nanjing University School of Business publishing high-impact papers in international top-tier journals such as AMJ [Academy of Management Journal] and JAP [ Journal of Applied Psychology]. (S11) In the announcement of S11 above, an individual’s achievement was seen as contributing to the honor of the school. In a job advertisement for recruiting researchers for its business research center, S2 linked the aspiration to

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publish ‘in the most influential and reputable first-class international journals’ to the university’s goal of ‘continuously propelling cutting-edge research in the discipline of management for achieving excellent results’. Notably, several international top journals were profiled in S6’s and S11’s news reports of publications by academics: AMJ [Academy of Management Journal] is the journal of the Academy of Management. It is an internationally recognized top management journal. Its impact factor in 2012 was 5.91 and its five-year impact factor was 10.03. (S11) Journal of Accounting and Economics, Accounting Review and Journal of Accounting Research are internationally recognized as three top journals of accounting. (S6) Such profiling seems meant to glorify the achievements of the individual academics, hence of the entire schools.

Social facts of the selection and sorting mechanisms applied to academics The genres in our collection also constructed social facts related to the use of ‘selection mechanisms to sort researchers and research groups according to their effectiveness and productivity’ (Sousa et al., 2010: 1440), particularly in relation to achieving international publication.

Privileging job applicants with overseas backgrounds Seven of the job advertisements had an English version (in English only or in addition to a Chinese version), implying a strong interest in recruiting overseas academics. Indeed, favoring ‘overseas talents’ was obvious in all job advertisements irrespective of the linguistic medium. A prototypical ‘overseas talent’, as seen in the job advertisements, would be someone who has received doctorate in a ‘well-known’ overseas university and, better still, who has worked overseas as an academic, with a record of publications in prestigious international journals. For example, S1 requires applicants to its ‘overseas talent post’ at the assistant professor level to have received a PhD from ‘an overseas well-known university’, that is, a university in the ‘top 50’ in the world.7 S15 also asks applicants to its professorial positions to have obtained a doctoral degree from ‘a world-renowned university’ and ‘if the PhD degree was from China, over 1–2 years overseas research experience is required’. S9’s employment conditions for overseas applicants further demonstrate the high regard given to overseas experience; for instance, applicants to the position of professor, apart from having a track record of publishing in international journals, ‘should have had at least five years of overseas working experience in the field of economics and management

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after receiving PhD from an overseas well-known university’ and ‘should have the experience of being a Principal Investigator on research projects’.

Labeling levels and categories of posts The 17 job advertisements and two documents detailing responsibilities and assessment criteria of different categories of academic posts in our collection illustrate a hierarchy of professorial positions at the CBSs involved. While differentiating between posts is a universal practice in academia, the way the hierarchies of posts were installed and labeled in these schools is worth noting. As described earlier, S5 adopted in its Talent Scheme three levels of posts: Level A, Level B and Level C, which correspond to three professorial ranks, respectively, and are matched with different levels of international publication requirements within a four-year contract. S7 likewise has three categories of posts: A, B and C, each matched to a set of ‘performance assessment criteria’ that quantified performance. Three schools label their posts more rhetorically (S8, S14 and S16). These posts were called ‘Disciplinary Leading Talents’, ‘Academic Leaders’ and ‘Overseas Outstanding Young Talents’ in S8; ‘Professor of Special Appointment I’, ‘Professor of Special Appoint II’ and ‘Faculty of Core Post’ (English in original) in S14; and ‘Special Appointment Post’, ‘Key Post’, ‘Core Post’ and ‘Important Post’ in S16. These posts are distinguished by appointment conditions and position responsibilities (with specifications given by S8 and S14) and by salaries (with specifications given by S8 and S16). Unlike the hierarchical-sounding posts of A, B and C at S5 and S7, which apply to the existing and newly employed academic staff, these posts aim to sort job applicants and all sounded prestigious.

Limiting and excluding by age The prestigious-sounding posts at S8, S14 and S16 for job applicants, however, all include age limits, which arguably serves as an exclusionary criterion when applicants are selected and sorted. Table 4.3 shows the age limit for each post at the three schools. It can be seen that applicants to the most prestigious position are expected to be below age 55 (S8 and S16) or 50 (S14). Next in order, for another post, is below 45 (S8 and S14) or 50 (S16) years old. The last category of post at S8 and S14 and the last two categories at S16 are open for applicants below 35. While it might be suggested that the age distinctions could work as a useful guide for applicants when considering suitable posts to apply to, the exclusionary effect of such age requirements is salient, that is, those who are above the age specified for a post will not be eligible.

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Table 4.3 Posts of target recruitment at S8, S14 and S16, with age limits S8

S14

S16

Disciplinary Leading Talents (age ≤55)

Professor of Special Appointment I (age