Two growth regimes in educational knowledge production: A comparative bibliometric analysis of education research in Malaysia and Pakistan in 2000 to 2025

Waqas Ahmad Watto () and Muhammad Ali ()
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Waqas Ahmad Watto: The University of Lahore
Muhammad Ali: Al Madinah International University

Journal of Modern Education Research, 2026, vol. 1, issue 1, 80-99

Abstract: Education research in the Global South has expanded rapidly, yet the structural properties of this expansion remain poorly documented outside a handful of large systems. This study compares the volume, impact, structure, and thematic composition of educational research produced in Malaysia and Pakistan between 2000 and 2025. Using the full-text OpenAlex index, 47,505 records classified in the education subfield and affiliated with institutions in the two countries were retrieved and analyzed (Malaysia = 35,928; Pakistan = 11,577). Performance analysis, Lotka and Bradford modelling, collaboration analysis, and topic profiling were applied, with Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) used as the principal normalised indicator. Both systems grew explosively but under different regimes: Malaysia grew at a compound annual rate of 20.8% and now specializes heavily in education (Activity Index = 1.81), whereas Pakistan grew faster but from a much smaller base (23.0% for 2010–2025; doubling time 3.3 years) and remains under-specialized in education relative to its national output (Activity Index = 0.73). Impact diverged sharply: mean FWCI was 2.33 for Malaysia and 1.72 for Pakistan, with 41.4% and 57.7% of records respectively uncited. In both systems, the citation distribution was extremely concentrated (Gini = 0.820 and 0.875), and author productivity was steeper than Lotka's inverse-square law predicts (fitted exponents of 4.15 and 5.93; Kolmogorov–Smirnov D exceeding critical values in both cases), indicating a large transient author population. International co-authorship carried a substantial premium, more than doubling the normalized impact in Pakistan (FWCI 1.18 domestic vs. 3.29 international). Bilateral Malaysia–Pakistan co-authorship remained thin (416 papers, 0.9% of the combined corpus) but outperformed both national means (FWCI = 3.49). The findings suggest that publication volume in both systems has decoupled from citation visibility and that policy attention should shift from output targets toward collaboration infrastructure and venue quality.

Keywords: bibliometrics; education research; Malaysia; Pakistan; research policy; OpenAlex (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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