Realities in scholarly publication trends: A case study of a social science university in Taiwan

For the past decade, the increasingly globalizing phenomenon of the academe have cause dynamic changes in the character and functions of education in most countries. Similarly, in East Asia, the island state of Taiwan has been undergoing remarkable changes in its higher education. Policy with strong emphasis on the quest for world-class universities was adopted, giving rise to the use of quantifiable variables to measure the quality in research. Knowledge production has been characterized by internationalization and competition, which is governed to an increasing degree through practices based on market-like operations. This case study takes this phenomenon as an indicator of the challenges facing the different level of Taiwan’s higher education academe. A comprehensive social science public university in Taiwan, was selected as the venue of this interpretive evaluative case study. Interviews were conducted on participants selected using the maximum variation sampling method. Findings confirmed that knowledge production is governed to a rising scale through practices based on market-like operations. Contrasting views was seen in the social sciences and natural sciences publication practices. In addition, the quality of research is increasingly being connected with the journals indexed in the Thomson Reuters Institute of Scientific Information’s (ISI) databases, which is mostly dominated by the Anglo-American journals.