Abstract
With the advent of globalisation, an autonomous global science system has emerged. However, disparities persist in the extent to which different countries engage with this global system. Additionally, the social sciences remain marginalised within the system compared to the natural sciences. The national dimension continues to play a significant role in shaping research in the social sciences. This study focuses on the field of higher education, investigating knowledge production as a multi-scalar activity and mapping research spaces in both China and globally. Guided by a glonacal heuristic, the study employed a combination of bibliometric analysis and topic modelling for automated text mining, analysing 278,819 papers sourced from both global and national databases. The study identifies active agents, key venues, research paradigms, and topics in both the global and national research spaces. The findings confirm the heterogeneity of the global and China’s national higher education research spaces, while illustrating the evolutionary trajectories of higher education research on both scales. The study also highlights the dynamics and possibilities created by the intersection of scales and emphasises the variations in their structural openness. Empirical evidence from this research critiques the central-peripheral model, arguing that no singular, absolute centre exists within the global space. In multi-scalar spaces, positional shifts give rise to varying interpretations of these spaces and their interactions. Depending on perspective, the global research space could either be a field for exerting hegemony or a platform fostering epistemic diversity and dialogue among various epistemic traditions.
