Academic Profession Studies Going Global? What We Gain and What We Lose by Using Big Data

The focus of the seminar will be the globalization of academic profession studies: what happens when we want to explore the academic profession from a global rather than cross-national comparative perspective. How to study the expanding academic profession globally and how to collect and analyze the data? What is the future of academic profession research and what new opportunities are provided by global Big Data? While academic profession research has traditionally used academic surveys, nowadays new complementary data sources can be used (such as e.g. metadata from Scopus and Web of Science, data from merged datasets of different types etc.). However, huge numbers of observations come at a cost, compared with survey data and instruments. A comparison of advantages and limitations of survey methods (which the author has used extensively for a decade) and large-scale bibliometric methods will be presented. Major topics will be trade-offs in data collection and data analysis; advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing; the power of raw publication and citation metadata; and dataset availability, mergers, and running costs. Academic profession studies going global face opportunities previously hard to imagine. The author’s recent research on the global aging of the academic profession and the global super-class of highly cited researchers will be discussed in more detail. And implications for higher education research generally will be explored.

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