In this study, we explore how Swedish researchers from various fields understand their intellectual trajectories, from their doctoral studies to their current professional positions. Particular attention is paid to the role of collaborations, local research environments, and access to different types of resources in intellectual development and the formation of academic identities. The study aims to develop an integrated model that captures how different dimensions of academic careers and researcher identities are interlinked.

Theoretically, the study draws on Laudel and Gläser’s (2008) model, which conceptualizes academic careers as comprising three analytically distinct yet empirically interconnected trajectories: an organizational career, marked by movement between organizations and positions; an intellectual career, characterized by shifts between research tracks and projects; and a community career, defined by increasing visibility and status within scientific communities. While the primary focus of the present study is on intellectual trajectories, it also examines how these intersect with organizational and community careers. In addition, the study builds on a broad literature on academic identities and academic work, emphasizing the processual and constructivist dimensions of academic careers.

Empirically, this study is based on 26 qualitative interviews with individuals who completed their doctoral theses in natural/technical sciences, social sciences, or medicine in 2012 at a Swedish university and remained employed in the university sector about ten years later. The interviews were supplemented with bibliographic materials, including publication histories, visual representations of co-authorship, sample publications, and/or patents. These materials aided participants' recollection of key events, research practices, and collaborations, making their academic careers more tangible, and introduced individually tailored questions based on the provided materials.To identify and analyze patterns in the material, reflective thematic analysis was employed (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2019).

A majority of the participants have a background in the collective PhD model (Hakkarainen et al. 2016). Most completed compilation theses that included co-authored publications and were relatively well integrated into collaborative networks and project-based research groups, often led by the supervisor. Although all participants at the time of the interview were active as researcher and university teachers, and had permanent employment, two main organizational career tracks can be identified. In the social sciences, a teaching-oriented track predominated. This track often enabled earlier career establishment, particularly in terms of obtaining permanent positions. In contrast, in the natural/technical and medical sciences, a research-oriented track was dominant. This track was typically characterized by project-based employment and later career establishment.

The interviews reveal strong normative expectations concerning ideal academic careers, structured around the three career trajectories. The organizational career is expected to follow a standardized sequence of positions, characterized by specific timing, professional roles, mobility, and a primary focus on research activities. The intellectual career is associated with expectations of developing intellectual independence and producing novel research, alongside assumptions about developing research leadership and the acquisition of competitive grants. The community career is expected to involve the attainment of academic reputation and recognition as an expert in the field, as well as concrete achievements such as publishing in specific journals and serving as a principal investigator.

The results indicate that participants articulated and developed multiple professional identities in relation to these different career trajectories and their associated ideals. In relation to the organizational career, we identified identities such as the academic worker, the idealistic researcher, and the director, each reflecting different orientations toward institutional roles and responsibilities. With respect to intellectual careers, both a general developmental identity—from junior to senior scholar—and more discipline- and subject-specific identities were observed. These also included self-understandings linked to personal dispositions (such as being a “team player” or a “soloist”) and to different motivational orientations (for example, being driven by social relations, curiosity, or by a desire for social impact). A striking aspect of the findings is that professional identities were frequently articulated in relation to, and sometimes in tension with, perceived ideal academic careers, with participants positioning themselves by negotiating, reinterpreting, or distancing themselves from normative expectations rather than simply failing to meet them.

The findings underscore the complexity of academic careers and identity formation; consequently, further analysis is needed to refine and consolidate an integrated model that captures how these dimensions are dynamically interlinked.

Concerns about research credibility have become more visible in the age of generative artificial intelligence, as tools can lower the barrier for problematic practices such as fabricated references or misrepresented analyses. Yet, high-profile misconduct cases in the social sciences existed before recent technologies. For example, the Stapel case illustrated how limited transparency and weak verification practices can allow systemic problems to persist across a large body of published work raising questions about how research policies and incentives shape integrity and misconduct (Markowitz & Hancock, 2014; Stanford University, n.d.). Related debates have linked these risks to publication systems that reward statistically significant results and novelty which potentially amplify publication bias and discouraging null or complex findings (Francis, 2012; Pashler & Wagenmakers, 2012). At the same time, calls for organized openness and institutionalized verification have also faced resistance including arguments that transparency requirements may be demanding or could destroy public trust (Vazire, 2017).

Across the social sciences, approaches to replication and reproducibility have developed unevenly. Some fields such as economics and finance have moved further toward formalized expectations for sharing data and code, including journal-level practices intended to support cumulative and credible research (Christensen, 2016). However, higher education research occupies an interdisciplinary space and has often been described as fragmented and weakly cumulative with diverse epistemic traditions and limited consolidation of evidence across studies (Macfarlane & Grant, 2012; Tight, 2012). Within this context, clarification of core concepts is important. Replication can be understood as directly testing an original study’s claims using new data and the same methodological specifications while reproducibility concerns reexamining results using the same data and procedures (Dreber & Johannesson, 2025). Large-scale discussions in the broader social and behavioral sciences have emphasized that even studies that appear methodologically rigorous may fail to reproduce due to random or systematic error highlighting replication as one mechanism for independent verification (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). Initiatives such as the Transparency and Openness Promotion work have similarly framed replication and analytic transparency as complementary pathways to improving credibility (Nosek et al., 2015). At the same time, replication can generate cultural and epistemological tensions within disciplines, sometimes producing defensive reactions or concerns about policing rather than knowledge building (Peterson & Panofsky, 2021).

Against this background, this study examines how replication and reproducibility are institutionalized, enabled, and framed within higher education research. It adopts a qualitative, multisource document and discourse analysis of three interconnected layers as publication practices, journal transparency policies, and editorial discourse. The overarching question is how leading higher education journals publish, enable, and frame replication and reproducibility as components of cumulative science. Three subquestions guide the analysis by investigating what is labelled or treated as replication in published work, what is enabled through data and code sharing policies, and how these practices are justified and interpreted in editorial and policy texts. Methodologically, the publication mapping component of this study replicates established procedures used to investigate replication work in education research (Makel et al., 2012; Makel &Plucker, 2014). This paper extends the approach to more recent years and complementing it with an analysis of journal policies and editorial discourse. This design allows the study to move beyond counting replication outputs by showing how journals and other intermediary actors define, legitimize, or marginalize replication and reproducibility in practice.

Findings suggest that replication remains a marginal and unevenly institutionalized practice in higher education research. Descriptively, across four leading journals (2014 to 2025), very few papers display characteristics consistent with replication, and even fewer conduct systematic tests of prior findings. Policy texts tend to emphasize transparency, rigor, and ethical standards, but rarely articulate replication as a valued scholarly contribution. Editorial discourse often highlights diversity, context dependence, and conceptual innovation, shaping a field level understanding of knowledge production in ways that may leave replication conceptually underspecified and institutionally unsupported. Taken together, the analysis speaks to how research governance in higher education can strengthen credibility and trust by clarifying expectations, incentives, and infrastructures for cumulative evidence.

Introduction

In higher education research and practice, co-creative and participatory approaches have gained increasing attention as alternatives to traditional, researcher-driven models of knowledge production. These approaches challenge conventional hierarchies by positioning students not merely as participants, but as active partners who help shape research agendas, methodologies, and outcomes. Co-creation is widely associated with enhanced engagement, inclusion, and relevance of research and educational practices (Cook-Sather, 2020; Lubicz-Nawrocka & Bovill, 2021). However, empirical insight into how co-creative research processes unfold in practice, particularly when students occupy leading roles, remains limited.

This study addresses this gap through an in-depth qualitative case study of a student-led co-research project conducted in the Netherlands. Within this co-research, students took the lead in shaping and conducting a research project, while professional researchers acted primarily as facilitators and reflective partners. The project setting constituted unconventional co-research in which traditional academic hierarchies were deliberately reconfigured, which required continuous negotiation of roles, responsibilities, and authority. This made the case particularly suitable for examining how co-creation is enacted when students are positioned as research leaders rather than junior partners, and for identifying conditions under which co-creative research practices become inclusive and meaningful.

The analysis draws on the analytical framework for co-creational interactions developed by Omland et al. (2025), which conceptualizes co-creation through four interrelated elements: dialogue, positioning, voice, and agency. Dialogue refers to reciprocal, open-ended communication oriented toward shared meaning-making. Positioning concerns how participants are situated in relation to one another, particularly with respect to authority and legitimacy. Voice captures the extent to which participants’ perspectives can be articulated and have influence, while agency refers to participants’ capacity to act purposefully and effect change within the collaborative process. These elements are understood as mutually constitutive and together shape how co-creation is experienced and enacted.

This study further connects the co-creation framework to two related concepts: agentic engagement and student mattering. Agentic engagement refers to proactive, intentional contributions through which participants seek to influence their learning or working environments (Reeve, 2013; Reeve et al., 2025). Student mattering denotes the extent to which individuals feel noticed, valued, needed, and recognized within a collaborative context (Flett et al., 2019). In this study, both constructs function primarily as analytical lenses for understanding how students experience leadership, agency, and recognition within co-creative research.

Aim and Research Questions

The aim of this study is to examine how co-creation unfolds within a student-led research collaboration and to identify conditions under which such collaborations foster meaningful participation, agency, and a sense of mattering among students and professional researchers. Specifically, the study explores and refines the co-creation framework proposed by Omland et al. (2025) by examining its applicability in a student-led research context beyond formal educational settings. The study addresses the following research questions:

1. How do students and professional researchers experience dialogue, positioning, voice, and agency within a student-led co-creative research collaboration?
2. How do these co-creative elements shape students’ experiences of agentic engagement and mattering?
3. Which practices and conditions support sustainable, inclusive, and equitable co-creation in student-led research initiatives in higher education?

Methods

The study adopted a qualitative, interpretive research design grounded in analytic auto-ethnography (Anderson, 2006), an approach well suited to examining relational and process-oriented phenomena such as co-creation, where researchers are also participants in the setting under study. The design was exploratory and focused on understanding how co-creation was enacted and experienced, rather than on evaluating substantive project outcomes.

The case was situated within a youth-led research initiative involving students from diverse educational backgrounds and professional researchers affiliated with a university of applied sciences. In total, 15 participants were involved. Sampling was naturalistic and limited to members of the project team. Data collection combined three sources: (1) online narrative inquiry questionnaires, and (2) separate focus groups with students and professional researchers. Data were analyzed using a constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2014), involving iterative coding and theoretical integration. The data is collected and we are now in the analyzing phase.

At the EAIR, we will report on the results and discuss them in the light of the research questions.