HIGHER EDUCATION QUARTERLY最新文献

This study examines scientific misconduct in the Global South amid technological change and institutional pressures, proposing strategies to foster a sustainable culture of research integrity. Adopting a systematic review design guided by the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) framework, this study ensures methodological rigour, transparency, and reproducibility of the findings. Relevant literature was retrieved from Scopus and Web of Science, applying inclusion and exclusion criteria that yielded 60 eligible articles. These studies were critically synthesised using a six-stage thematic analysis to identify regional patterns, drivers of misconduct, and effective mitigation strategies. Misconduct is shaped by structural, cultural, and technological factors, evolving from traditional unethical practices to AI-enabled forms due to academic competition and weak governance. Drivers include personal pressures, poor oversight, inadequate mentorship, technological misuse, socio-cultural tolerance of unethical norms, and limited national research policies. Recommended measures include prioritising research quality, establishing independent integrity offices, embedding ethics education, and fostering collaboration among governments, universities, and publishers. The study provides actionable guidance for policymakers and academic institutions to enhance governance, promote ethical awareness, and reduce misconduct. This research integrates technological, institutional, and socio-cultural dimensions to advance understanding of integrity challenges in the Global South.

We examine how students in higher education respond to governance and self-regulate AI use for learning within evolving institutional norms. Using a qualitative design and interviews with 25 students from three leading STEM universities in India, we analyse students' engagement with AI tools across regulatory—self-regulation, co-regulation, socially shared regulation, and top-down regulation—and governance dimensions. Our findings indicate that student agency is shaped by both pedagogical and governance aspects of AI. Students actively interpret AI policies, seek legitimacy for AI use, and negotiate institutional expectations through compliance, adaptation, and peer standardisation. We propose a conceptual framework combining the regulation dimension with AI governance, suggesting four student-centred scenarios for the use of AI: student-AI as mutually reinforcing, AI as a peer, AI as a co-creator, and AI as a rule-based tool. Our study challenges binary perspectives of AI governance as either strict prohibition or unrestricted autonomy. Instead, we argue for a balanced approach where institutions provide clear guidelines while fostering student-driven, ethical AI use.

In the context of globalisation and ongoing educational reforms, universities are of increasing importance as central platforms for knowledge creation and talent cultivation. The mission statements articulated in institutional narratives play a crucial role in shaping the cultural identity and public image of universities. This study applies Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CACDA) to examine the ‘About’ sections of 147 ‘double first-class’ Chinese universities and the top 150 US universities. Using AntConc for keyword, collocation and concordance analysis, this study identifies recurrent rhetorical strategies and sociocultural themes in institutional self-narratives. We outline a stratified systemic functional transitivity module to connect clause-level choices with identity work in mission texts. The findings reveal that while Chinese and American universities emphasise a global vision and research excellence, Chinese institutions place a stronger emphasis on national identity and cultural heritage. In contrast, American institutions focus more on liberal education and community engagement. These differences reflect distinct cultural, economic and political contexts in higher education, offering insights for cross-cultural academic collaborations. The study contributes to higher education research and practice by linking corpus patterns, clause-level realisations and organisational identity claims in mission discourse. This combined linguistic approach not only deepens theoretical understanding of identity construction in higher education but also informs more effective institutional communication.

Increasingly, reviewers are asked to engage with citation-based indicators, yet we know little about how those numbers are actually translated into judgements. This article builds on an extensive literature review in which the author identifies “chains of reasoning” that connect metrics with factors such as quality, prestige, recognition, and career potential. The study analyses 174 negative habilitation review reports (2012–2021) from four disciplines in Poland—Art History, Sociology, Mathematics, and Materials Engineering—to map how reviewers reason with metrics in practice. We identify and code passages where quantitative indicators are transformed into qualitative claims and reconstruct the “chains of reasoning” that link numbers to evaluative conclusions. The prevalence of metric-based reasoning varies sharply by field—from about 4% of reviews in Art History to 71% in Materials Engineering—while Mathematics and Sociology occupy intermediate positions. Across disciplines, metrics are interpreted primarily as signals of recognition or visibility and influence or uptake; direct inferences from metrics to intrinsic quality are comparatively rare. Reviewers sometimes inspect citation contexts (e.g., self-citations) and time lags, but explicit reflexivity about the limitations of indicators is infrequent. Crucially, metrics never stand alone: even the most metric-intensive reviews combine numbers with content-based critique. We catalogue nine recurring reasoning types and show how a uniform policy that mandates attention to metrics yields heterogeneous, discipline-specific evaluative practices. The article advances scholarship on responsible research assessment by explaining how metrics travel from numbers to judgements and by offering practical guidance: use indicators as contextual evidence, make interpretive assumptions explicit, and calibrate benchmarks to disciplinary evaluative cultures.

The study investigates the impact of parenthood on the careers of PhD holders who work outside academia, with a focus on gender differences. It analyses the dialogues between professional and parental roles of 38 Spanish PhD holders from various disciplines, their interaction with social discourses about parenthood and the outcomes of these dialogues to identify the impact of parenthood on participants' careers. Dialogues and discourses about parenthood that emerged from the data were organised into three participant profiles: PhD holders for whom parenthood was central, composed mostly of women; PhD holders who ‘fitted’ parenthood into their trajectories, composed mostly of men; and childfree PhD holders, with a more balanced gender distribution. Many participants acknowledged that non-academic careers offer better opportunities for balancing parenthood and work than academic careers. The study highlights the importance of examining dialogues and social discourses to understand how personal and societal factors influence career decision-making processes.