A synthesis of published comparative education research, 2014-2015: Further data for reflection in comparative and international education

Research has established that reflective practice is a key to professionalization, but reflective practice requires data upon which to reflect. This research provides a two-year synthesis of data on comparative and international education scholarship, and the institutional, relational, topical, and methodological characteristics of the field producing this scholarship. By examining the scholarship published in comparative and international education journals in 2014 and 2015, analyses empirically examined the researcher characteristics, content coverage, and methodological approach of this published work. The analyses reported here find that about half of the publications in CIE in 2015 were by single authors and focused on single countries. The dominant methodology in the published scholarship continues to be overwhelmingly qualitative. This suggests that scholarship in comparative and international education over this two-year period may be characterized as single-author, single-country, qualitative case studies.