Conference Agenda

Educational research is a systematic field of inquiry that examines educational and learning processes as well as the actors, interactions, and institutions that shape them (American Educational Research Association [AERA], n.d.). It spans impact-oriented evaluations for planning/policy and qualitative inquiry into sociocultural norms and contexts (Postlethwaite, 2005). Yet UNESCO highlights a persistent gap between the capacity of educational research to generate evidence and the uptake of that evidence in policy and practice across many contexts (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], n.d.).

As the volume of educational research grows, classification and labelling systems constitute a key infrastructure for making the literature findable and comparable; reflected in missions to strengthen research–policy linkages (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], n.d.). Knowledge organization systems (e.g., taxonomies, thesauri/controlled vocabularies, and classification schemes) provide a shared representational language that supports discovery and reduces terminological fragmentation, enabling related work to be brought together rather than dispersed across divergent naming practices (National Information Standards Organization [NISO], 2010).

In education, controlled vocabularies such as the ERIC Thesaurus provide established examples of standardising the subject representation of education-related publications, thereby facilitating access to and review of the literature (Pollard, Hellrich-Dawson, & Beck, 2015). Classification can therefore be understood as a structural instrument that supports not only the quantitative expansion of educational research but also its development as a cumulatively readable knowledge domain. In educational research, this “structural instrument” is evident not only at the level of database indexing but also in infrastructures for systematic reviews and evidence mapping formats (e.g., keywording-based registers/maps and evidence gap maps), as well as in clearinghouse-type evidence products (EPPI-Centre, 2001; Institute of Education Sciences, n.d.; International Initiative for Impact Evaluation [3ie], n.d.). Yet while these approaches largely operate at the level of topics and evidence, they often leave opaque how knowing travels into acting—in other words, how educational claims connect to assumptions about reality and to the aims and values that shape practice and policy.

Making education’s epistemological, ontological, and praxiological/axiological layers visible in an integrated and traceable way both addresses this opacity and enables a more holistic reading of the scope of educational research: any educational question simultaneously touches on knowledge (epistemology), a view of reality and the person–world relationship (ontology), and an aims/values/action horizon (praxiological/axiological orientation).

Paradigm debates make this entanglement explicit by emphasising that ontological and epistemological assumptions must be considered together with a value-related dimension and that inquiry is not value-free (Guba & Lincoln, 1994; Guba & Lincoln, 2005). Yet within established classification and mapping approaches, these philosophical layers often remain at the level of paradigm discussion; in particular, the axiological/praxiological dimension is less consistently translated into systematic representation (Laitsch, n.d.). As a result, large-scale classifications of the educational research literature rarely allow the integrated tracing of these three layers.

The aim of this study is to interrogate the “scope” of educational studies by proposing a multi-layered classification approach that brings epistemological, ontological, and praxiological/axiological dimensions together, making scope visible not only through topic headings but also through conceptions of knowledge, views of educational reality, and aims/values/action horizons. The study discusses the extent to which these dimensions can be traced for classification when they are stated explicitly, implied, or left unarticulated in research texts.

Research Questions

1. How far can an integrated epistemological–ontological–praxiological/axiological classification make the scope of educational studies and the relations between these layers traceable beyond topic-based representations?
2. Does it render studies’ praxiological/axiological orientations (e.g., policy/practice guidance, improvement vs. transformative aims, recommendations) distinguishable?
3. What recurrent patterns during application indicate components that require refinement?

Despite increasing commitments to open science, citation data in educational research remain largely fragmented, incomplete, and frequently locked behind proprietary systems. Commercial citation databases such as Web of Science and Scopus not only restrict access through subscription-based models but also provide limited coverage of educational research output (Moed, 2005). This lack of coverage is particularly pronounced for national publication contexts, such as German-language educational research, which remains underrepresented in major commercial indices (Heinze et al., 2019). In response, open database providers such as OpenAlex (Priem et al., 2022) have emerged as alternatives to commercial systems, aiming to expand disciplinary breadth and geographical inclusivity in research output coverage.

Nevertheless, educational research poses specific challenges for open citation infrastructures. The field is characterized by a high degree of heterogeneity in publication types, languages, national research traditions, and dissemination channels. Alongside journal articles, monographs, edited volumes, research reports, and practice-oriented publications play a central role in scholarly communication. However, citation data for these formats are particularly sparse or inconsistently represented in existing open infrastructures. As a consequence, citation-based discovery, bibliometric analysis, and systematic knowledge mapping in educational research remain severely constrained, limiting both analytical insight and the transparency of research evaluation processes.

To address these limitations, federated research infrastructures increasingly aim to contribute publication and reference data to an open, distributed research information ecosystem. Within this broader transformation of scholarly infrastructures, open citation data have emerged as a key component. This development is closely linked to current debates on the reform of research assessment practices, as reflected in initiatives such as the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) (coara.org) and the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information (barcelona-declaration.org). Complementary initiatives, including the Initiative for Open Citations (i4oc.org), specifically promote the availability of citation relationships as open, machine-readable, and interoperable data, thereby reducing structural dependencies on commercial providers.

The project Open Citation Data for Educational Research (Weimer et al., 2025) builds directly on these initiatives and aims to integrate open reference and citation data into FIS Bildung, the core reference system for educational literature in German-speaking countries. FIS Bildung cooperates with 30 partner institutions that collect, index, and curate relevant educational research publications. It is embedded within the Fachportal Pädagogik, a subject-specific search portal that provides unified access to publications from a wide range of national and international databases, including ERIC.

The following contribution introduces the OFFZIB project, outlines its conceptual and infrastructural foundations, and discusses the connectivity and effectiveness of its objectives in contributing to a sustainable European and international solution for open citation data in educational research.

Research fields such as the field of European educational research encompass many different constituting factors. Those factors include its personnel (i.e. authors), research associations (i.e. EERA, EARLI, WERA and the multitude of national/regional associations), institutions, conferences (such as ECER) and many more. The increasing projectification of research and the funding programme logics that accompany it further increase the complexity of the field.
Even when considering these aspects, the main fault lines of the field remain unaddressed: its underlying theoretical and methodological paradigms (Alise & Teddlie, 2010; Mackenzie & Knipe, 2006). These paradigms are closely intertwined with national, regional and language-specific traditions—such as national schools of thought, policies, curricula and education systems — which further increase the diversity and complexity of (European) educational research. This makes it extremely difficult to identify, analyse and ultimately map the field as a whole.
By gathering, analysing, aggregating and mapping the themes of (European) educational research output, first steps to map the field may be taken. While prior work has partly achieved this for conference proceedings (Christ et al., 2025a, 2025b) and efforts for publications are ongoing, the influence of funding programmes on the field’s constitution has yet to be explored.
This is exactly where the presented project comes in, as we set out to gather information on and map third-party funded educational research projects in comparison to thematic clusters, trends identified within a corpus of contributions to international conferences on educational research (for example ECER, WERA). Those comparisons were enabled by utilizing the results of the webapp EduTopics (Christ et al., 2025b), which contains aggregated information on the themes, authors and countries of affiliation for ECER since 1998.
To even enable a semblance of comparability without potential biases based on skewed data distributions due to national research traditions, policies, languages etc. or selection biases due to focusing on national funding programmes, we selected only third-party funded projects within the “Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development (FP)” (since 2014: Horizon) of the European Union for the analysis. The themes of the projects were identified by utilizing the mapping functions in the toolbox-section of EduTopics. Based on the resulting distributions, we answer the following research questions:
1. What are the main themes investigated in FP/Horizon projects?
2. Do the foci and time trends of FP/Horizon projects differ in comparison to conference proceedings?
3. How are the FP/Horizon distributed across participating countries? Are the emerging patterns similar or different to the conference data included in EduTopics?
4. Can we identify contributions to the conferences stemming from FP/Horizon projects?

This study investigates how education journals in Türkiye contribute to the circulation, accessibility, and practical uptake of academic knowledge in a rapidly changing global knowledge ecosystem. The research is motivated by the observation that education research increasingly operates within an environment shaped by open science mandates, international indexation pressures, digitalisation, artificial intelligence assisted publishing processes, and shifting expectations concerning the societal relevance of scholarly work. Although education journals serve as key mediators between knowledge production and its potential users, little empirical evidence exists regarding how they conceptualise and enact this role particularly in contexts where academic performance regimes and research evaluation systems strongly influence editorial practice.

The overarching research question guiding this study is: How do Turkish education journals facilitate, hinder, or unintentionally reshape the transfer of academic knowledge to educational practitioners?
To address this question, the study examines (1) the mission and orientation of education journals, (2) the extent to which published content supports practitioner engagement, and (3) how teachers themselves perceive, access, and (do not) use academic knowledge.

The conceptual framework integrates a micro–mezo–macro analytical model, which allows for a multilayered understanding of the knowledge ecosystem:

• Micro level (practitioners): Teacher perceptions, access patterns, and their evaluation of the usability of academic research.

• Mezo level (journals): Editorial orientations, peer-review practices, journal policies, and the thematic/methodological profile of recent publications.

• Macro level (knowledge governance): National and international structures shaping academic publication practices, including TÜBİTAK TR Dizin criteria, YÖK research evaluation systems, open science frameworks, and the influence of international indexation systems such as Scopus and Web of Science.

This framework positions journals not merely as neutral dissemination channels but as actors embedded within power-laden, policy-driven, and technologically mediated knowledge infrastructures. The study engages directly with European debates on open research, the role of scholarly communication in addressing societal challenges, and concerns about the fragmentation of scientific knowledge due to increasing performativity pressures.

In line with ECER’s 2026 theme on “Knowing and Acting,” the study critically interrogates how evolving knowledge conditions marked by digitalisation, big data, generative AI, and poly-crises shape the production and utilisation of educational knowledge. The findings aim to contribute to international conversations about how scholarly publishing can better support evidence-informed educational practice and democratic access to knowledge.

Through an empirical examination of the Turkish context, the research offers insights relevant beyond national borders. Many European education systems face similar tensions between academic prestige-oriented publishing and demands for practitioner-oriented, accessible, and actionable research. By situating Türkiye within this broader landscape, the study provides a comparative perspective on how national publication ecosystems interact with global knowledge infrastructures and shape the flow of educational knowledge.