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Mapping out the Research Field of Adult Education and Learning pp 157–177Cite as

Adult Education Research from Rhizome to Field? A Bibliometrical Analysis of Conference Programs of ESREA from 1994 to 2016

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Part of the book series: Lifelong Learning Book Series ((LLLB,volume 24))

Abstract

Adult education research is frequently an own subject of research. Such research is often focused on the analysis of journals. This paper will present a partly updated analysis of triennial research conferences of the European Society for the Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) between 1994 and 2016. A bibliometrical program analysis of conference papers will be done. Results support previous findings in the analysis of adult education research, but a number of differences or blind spots of ESREA and adult education research in general will become visible as well.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Translation of quote by author.

  2. 2.

    http://www.rizoma-freireano.org/index.php/editorial/editorial-en

  3. 3.

    I am deeply thankful for the advice and support I received from Gerhard Bisovsky, Andreas Fejes, Fergal Finnegan, Barry Hake, Ewa Kurantowicz, Emilio Lucio-Villegas and Henning Salling-Olesen. Emma Fawcett was as native speaker a critical-constructive proof reader.

  4. 4.

    I am deeply thankful also for the work and support foremost of my assistant Mirko Ückert and my former research team: Erik Haberzeth, Claudia Kulmus and Nina Lichte. They contributed in different ways to the coding of papers.

  5. 5.

    For each paper, all citations were counted. In a second step the number of cited policy documents – national and inter-/transnational ones – was counted. National documents meant all kind of publications which refer to national state institutions like governments, ministries, statistical offices on all federal or regional levels. Inter-/transnational documents were differentiated between various EU documents, OECD documents, UNESCO documents and a category “other documents” with miscellaneous contributions from the World Bank, International Labour Office, the Council of Europe or other agencies.

  6. 6.

    The tag clouds were built and saved via the freeware program Tagxedo (www.tagxedo.com).

    (Therefore) the data of the citations were freed from all information other than the full last name and the initials of the first name. Some names received special treatment, because of their special spelling. Popular last names like Smith, Schmitt or Andersen were controlled in relation to the first name. Institutions/organisations were coded in categories (NationalPolicy, EUPolicy, OECD, OtherTrans). Other organisations like national research institutes were quantitatively of no relevance. Tagxedo build the clouds based on the 50 most frequently names. Persons more often cited are written bigger than persons less often cited. The tag clouds were configured visually. The changed parameters of Tagxedo were: Emphasis: 60%, Tightness: 60%. Other parameters of the algorithm were not changed. The tag clouds can thus be reproduced, although Tagxedo allows images to be saved, but not the parameters.

  7. 7.

    Intensive definitions and discussions on this classification can be found in Long (1983).

  8. 8.

    It would be interesting to observe more closely what influence the ‘re-importing’ of Bourdieu and Foucault had after their success in North America

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  1. Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Giessen, Germany

    Bernd Käpplinger

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Correspondence to Bernd Käpplinger .

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  1. Department of Behavioural Sciences & Learning, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Andreas Fejes  & Erik Nylander  & 

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Käpplinger, B. (2019). Adult Education Research from Rhizome to Field? A Bibliometrical Analysis of Conference Programs of ESREA from 1994 to 2016. In: Fejes, A., Nylander, E. (eds) Mapping out the Research Field of Adult Education and Learning. Lifelong Learning Book Series, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10946-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10946-2_9

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