Patterns of Publishing in German Civic Education Research: A Co-authorship Network

Abstract

Research as a social process suggests that the collective research agenda of a discipline is shaped by its structural features which thus helps to explain why we actually discuss what we discuss within an academic domain. This assumption also substantially informs publication patterns and co-authorship networks in German civic education research: Who are the most central researchers? What groups of collaborating researchers exist? How do these clusters diverge in their characteristics? The article addresses these questions by drawing on an encompassing dataset that considers multiple publication types including book publications, journal articles and chapters in edited volumes with more than 3000 contributions and 900 authors published between 2014 and 2020 in German civic education research. Using bibliometrics, different techniques of network analysis and consensus graph clustering methods, the analysis reveals patterns of co-authorship and presents the first systematic mapping of the discipline. In this way, the most important research clusters, their characteristics and the major researchers in the domain of civic education research in Germany are assessed.