Nelius Boshoff

In recent years, scientific communities across disciplines have called for addressing the inequalities that structure their respective fields. Their calls are supported by a growing body of studies concerned with geographical and gender-related inequalities in scientific publishing. However, a persistent disconnect remains between quantitative and qualitative analyses, preventing an understanding of how authorship patterns relate to researchers’ experiences of publishing. Moreover, there is a paucity of studies theorizing the results obtained for a more comprehensive understanding of macro–micro-linkages. We address this gap with a mixed-methods study on publishing in forest governance research that draws on and advances Bourdieusian theory by shifting the spotlight on epistemic choices and struggles in relation to researchers’ capital and field positions. Using a bricolage approach, we triangulate quantitative bibliometric and qualitative interview analysis in an integrative mixed-methods design. We empirically show how geographical and gender inequalities emerging at the publication level (authors and articles) relate to the epistemic choices and struggles experienced by African forest governance researchers. The study highlights the potential of applying a coherent theoretical frame in mixed-methods research on inequalities in scientific publishing across local and international spaces.

Drawing on a Bourdieusian understanding of science, our study examines how the global forest research workforce is stratified by configurations of capital, gender and geography. We studied four capital types, representing both scientific and social capital: scientific output (papers), symbolic recognition (citations), national collaborative ties (national co-authors), and international collaborative ties (international co-authors). Our dataset, compiled from Dimensions, contains author-level data on these capital types for 125,501 researchers who have published in forestry sciences between 2005 and 2024. Using Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), a multivariate, person-centered statistical approach, we inductively identified seven subgroups of researchers. The smallest subgroup (3.3%) dominates the field at all capital levels, while two other subgroups, which are considered ‘subordinate’ in the Bourdieusian sense, together represent half (50.4%) of all forest researchers. We measured gender in terms of masculine or feminine author names and geography as the region of academic origin, based on the country of affiliation of the first paper. Our intersectional analysis of gender, region, and subgroup reveals that, although women and researchers from the Global South are present in forest research and contribute to it, they remain disproportionately concentrated in subordinate subgroups.

Our study focuses on research representation and societal alignment as two facets of research evaluation. We investigated how Tanzanian forest research is represented in bibliographic databases and the extent to which these representations align with national societal demands. To address the former, we conducted a representation analysis of forestry research publications by Tanzanian-affiliated authors in the period 2005–2021. We used four databases: two commercial (Scopus and Web of Science), one semi-commercial (Dimensions), and one fully open (OpenAlex). We also added a manually curated dataset of articles from local Tanzanian journals, resulting in a total of 1,496 unique articles. While both OpenAlex and the local journal dataset posed challenges, both were necessary to provide the most comprehensive representation of forest research in Tanzania. Together, they account for 90% of the ‘total’ set of publications. For the second question, we selected articles from 2017 to 2021 only, downloading their full texts. We conducted a quantitative content analysis by coding these 728 articles in terms of four Tanzanian socio-ecological elements that we identified as potential markers of societal demand: national research priorities in forestry, forest tenure arrangements, forest types, and forest regions. Our findings suggest that the issue of alignment is not simply binary (with publications in local journals being better aligned with national interests and those in mainstream databases being less aligned), but rather one of convergence and divergence depending on the context and measures used.

This bibliometric study concerns the level of inclusion of researchers in the global scientific community, based on the extent to which they contribute to the so-called publication ‘core’: a set of journals characterised by international scope and citation interconnectedness. An author-level dataset of forestry researchers, compiled from Dimensions and OpenAlex for the period 2005-2022, was analysed. Each researcher was classified into one of seven groups based on the distribution of percentages of ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ forestry publications. The ‘core exclusivity’ and ‘non-core exclusivity’ groups together accounted for nearly 80% of all 115,062 researchers. Notable percentages of researchers in non-core-related groups in forestry also had core-related publications outside of forestry. Regional and country differences were also explored.

Scientific knowledge circulates through multiple publishing spaces. They play a key role in structuring scholarly communication by assigning differential visibility to authors and their research. In this exploratory study, we approach publications as products through which social and epistemic differences between local and international scientific spaces can be examined. Drawing on Bourdieusian theory, we understand science as a social field in which actor positions and epistemic choices are co-constitutive and related to capital. The study investigates this relation by combining a qualitative content analysis of Tanzanian-authored forest governance articles in local and international outlets with a quantitative analysis of their bibliometric metadata. The articles were coded for selected epistemic choices (choice of topics, methods, purpose, framing of forests), and then comparatively analysed for social aspects of authorship (gender, first authorship, institutional affiliation, single/co-authorship, collaboration, funding).Our findings show patterns of similarity and difference between the local and international datasets examined. They suggest that the field of forest governance is homogeneous in terms of the researchers’ choice of methods and their study purpose; also, men dominate as authors both in Tanzanian and international journals. However, they display differences in topics, geographical research focus, and framing of forests, which correspond to contrasting trends in funding opportunity and collaborations. The latter provide insight into differentiated access to cycles of social and scientific capital accumulation. The implication is that the current focus on ‘international’ research – as represented by international, digital science databases – reproduces a cycle of scientific and social capital accumulation for those who already have it, as well as a high barrier to entry for Tanzania-affiliated authors whose local journals are not as integrated and visible.

This study examines how scholars narrate agency and luck in scientific careers, focusing on geographic space and gender as structuring dimensions. Drawing on interviews with forest governance researchers, we analyze how they discursively construct professional trajectories. European scholars often frame their academic trajectories as outcomes of epistemic interests and agentic choices, while African scholars tend to narrate their careers through the lens of luck and external circumstances. Gender differences are less marked in linguistic expressions of agency but appear in the attribution of luck, with women—from both Africa and Europe—emphasizing private life conditions, particularly partnership and family situations. We argue that these discursive patterns reflect and reproduce social stratifications in global science. Our findings highlight the importance of integrating spatial and gendered contexts into studies of scientific careers and the need for science policies that foster epistemic autonomy and gender-inclusive career conditions across diverse academic landscapes.

Despite shifts in science policy and funding modalities, international research collaborations continue to be shaped by inequalities that structure global science. These include a skewed division of tasks and unequal scientific authority in North-South partnerships. Existing scholarship highlights scholars’ experiences of such inequalities, but offers little explanation of how they are reproduced and affect joint knowledge production. We address this gap with an empirical study of six African-European research projects on forests. Drawing on Bourdieu’s sociology of science, we employ a praxeological methodology that includes participant observation in collaborative meetings, analysis of project-related documents and reflexive interviews with scholars involved. We show discrepancies between how collaborators’ relations were designed and practiced: Even when projects had been set up as equal partnerships aimed at joint knowledge making, the emerging collaboration orders tended to reflect differential roles and unequal authority in epistemic choices. While African scholars exerted authority over field work, European scholars directed the ‘how to’ of conducting forest governance research. We explain the continuity of this pattern with Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus: a practical sense of roles scholars have internalised, resulting from their positions in global science and the capitals (economic, scientific, social, symbolic) they are endowed with. The study illuminates how and why inequalities in research collaborations persist, regardless of formal project constellations and contrary to individual intentions. It highlights the potential of Bourdieusian theory for empirical science studies, with habitus as a concept explaining discrepancies between desired forms of collaboration and actual collaboration practice.

This study used bibliometric analysis as a form of meta-research to examine the practice and cognitive connections between three bibliometric user groups in South Africa. Bibliometric user groups refer to categories of university scholars who apply aspects of bibliometric analysis in their research. The first such group consists of university researchers who use bibliometrics as part of a broader specialisation in science, technology and innovation policy or the sociology of science. The second group involves researchers who specialise in library and information science; and the third group, researchers who specialise in other fields, but who use bibliometric applications in their own field of interest, very often as one-time studies. The connections between the three groups were studied through co-authorship analysis (as proxy for practice connections) and citation analysis (as proxy for cognitive connections), using the SAKnowledgebase as a data source. The latter is database of research outputs by South African universities. Although it has been found that practice connections between the three bibliometric user groups are largely lacking, the analysis of cognitive connections has shown a more promising picture. Recommendations are made regarding the establishment of a community of bibliometric practice.

During collaboration in research, it may happen that some researchers become involved in behaviours that reflect so-called ‘self-interestedness’, which means that they pursue their personal interest or benefit without considering others. This study examined how researchers in Zimbabwe perceive instances of self-interestedness among research collaborators, and how these perceptions differ according to their career stage and the nature of collaboration. An online survey of researchers in Zimbabwe was conducted to gather information about six instances of self-interestedness among research collaborators. The results show that Zimbabwean researchers involved exclusively in national collaboration reported greater degrees of collaborator self-interestedness than Zimbabwean researchers involved in international collaboration. However, early-career researchers and established researchers did not differ significantly regarding their experiences of collaborator self-interestedness. Measures aimed at capacitating research organisations and research teams in developing countries in the African context, to counter collaborator self-interestedness, are recommended.