The study was motivated by persistent structural inequalities-prohibitive publishing costs, editorial biases, and fragmented institutional support-that hinder African scholars from achieving recognition in top-tier international journals. The research aimed to examine their perspectives on publishing in these outlets and to identify the factors shaping their research visibility. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the study gathered insights from 1,723 academics across Africa via an online questionnaire. Quantitative and thematic analysis revealed that while scholars are increasingly indexed in major databases and utilise academic social networks and researcher profiles (e.g., ORCID, Google Scholar, Scopus Author ID), their overall visibility remains low in terms of citations, editorial inclusion, and international engagement. Key barriers include unaffordable article processing charges, perceived geographic and methodological bias in peer review, and inconsistent institutional backing, particularly in financial and logistical support. In response, African scholars have adopted resilient strategies such as pursuing international collaborations, strategically selecting journals, leveraging open-access platforms, curating persistent digital scholarly identities, and engaging in continuous skill development. The study acknowledges that while individual researchers must take responsibility for maintaining comprehensive researcher profiles and embracing open science tools, systemic intervention remains critical. The study concludes that without coordinated structural and individual-levelintervention, their global scholarly impact will remain constrained. Therefore, the study recommends that African institutions implement sustained funding mechanisms for publication fees, enhance mentorship and writing support programmes, actively facilitate international research networks, mandate and support the adoption of persistent researcher identifiers such as ORCID, and promote the use of institutional repositories and preprint servers to amplify the reach and influence of African scholarship.
This article examines how Chile’s Free Higher Education (FHE) reform reconfigured the established policy regime across two core dimensions: the actors who hold legitimate authority (who) and the policy content considered technically acceptable (what). We analyse this struggle using concepts of policy narratives and social imaginaries to explore how legitimacy and expertise are contested during reform. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 25 interviews with policy elites and 529 newspaper documents published between 2003 and 2016, the study argues that Chile’s FHE reform represented not an institutional rupture but a partial reconfiguration in which authority widened and political content shifted towards rights-based narratives, while technical policy content proved more resilient. In this context, the 2011 student movement destabilised the pre-existing regime in which technocrats monopolised decision-making and elevated students as credible political actors, fundamentally challenging the dominant opposition between ‘reality’ (market-compatible reform) and ‘ideology’ (state intervention). This led to competing political imaginaries struggling to define the HE crisis and the direction of change. While political discourse increasingly emphasised rights and expanded state responsibility, funding instruments and targeting logics inherited from the subsidiario model persisted, resulting in a hybrid regime where FHE coexists with long-standing demand-subsidy mechanisms. The article shows how political and technical dimensions of reform can evolve unevenly, with significant shifts in legitimacy and policy orientation coexisting alongside durable institutional instruments.
Academic career paths are shaped not only by individual aspirations but also by social-institutional arrangements and organizational opportunity structures. In Germany, the science system is traditionally portrayed as a “dual pillar” structure, comprising universities and non-university research institutions (NURs). Although collaboration between these pillars has increased, particularly through science policy initiatives such as the Excellence Strategy and the Pact for Research and Innovation, it remains unclear whether career paths continue to follow separate tracks or increasingly span both pillars. This study investigates the career paths of doctoral graduates in six STEM disciplines using sequence analysis of CV data. We identify typical career patterns and interorganizational mobility between institutional contexts. Our findings reveal that some researchers pursue careers exclusively within universities or NURs, while others transition from one to the other. However, truly intertwined patterns crossing both types of institutions are rare and tend to be linked to specific academic goals, such as attaining a professorship. Drawing on Hermanowicz’ sociology of academic careers and Laudel and Gläser’s concept of organizational career, we conceptualize universities and NURs not simply as pillars, but as distinct organizational contexts with partially overlapping logics and structural conditions. Despite increasing collaboration in research, employment conditions and career incentives remain asymmetrical. To enable more dynamic and cross-institutional career paths, science policy must move beyond fostering research collaboration and address structural disparities that shape long-term career paths.
China’s rapid ascent as a scientific superpower has disrupted the Euro-American duopoly in global science, attracting a growing number of STEM international doctoral students, particularly from the Global South. However, the intricate global-national-local (glonacal) power dynamics that pose unique challenges to these students’ learning remain understudied. Through interviews with 20 STEM international doctoral students from the Global South, this narrative inquiry examined how glonacal powers influenced students’ learning experiences and how students negotiated the powers. Framed by theorisation of global-national-local imbrications and the notion of ‘in-between agency’, findings revealed that students navigated triple-dimensional power tensions, caught among enduring hegemony of Western academia, China’s national scientific ambitions, and ‘local’ supervisors as gatekeepers of STEM knowledge and networks. These power tensions led to an ambivalent positioning that marginalised international students across the local laboratory, national and global scientific communities. Yet, students enacted in-between agency to negotiate glonacal power tensions, by bridging local lab resources, China’s research training, and global knowledge production. This study contributes to the literature by integrating glonacal and agency perspectives to illuminate STEM international doctoral students’ negotiation of learning experiences in an emerging scientific power context. It offers policy and institutional suggestions to better support these students amid multipolar global science.
As generative artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into higher education, concerns have emerged regarding its influence on students’ cognitive engagement, evaluative judgment, and reliance on AI-generated outputs. Despite the growing interest in ChatGPT in STEM education, limited research has examined students’ perceptions of ChatGPT, and the cognitive engagement reflected in their interactions with the tool in graduate engineering education. This mixed-methods study investigated graduate students’ perceptions of ChatGPT while interacting with the tool in three different mining engineering tasks. Twelve students participated in the study and multiple data sources, including screen recordings, surveys, written reflections, and interviews, were collected to examine their interactions with the tool. Qualitative analysis identified five distinct interaction types: (1) reliance with minimal verification, (2) reliance with critical evaluation, (3) collaborative engagement, (4) skeptical or limited use, and (5) learning-driven use. The interaction patterns differed in agency, metacognitive engagement, planning, verification, and evaluative judgment. Students’ interaction types also shifted dynamically across tasks, with later and more open-ended tasks encouraging more verification, reflection, and independent reasoning. Interaction time and the number of follow-up questions further differentiated the interaction types. Quantitative comparisons indicated descriptively higher post-survey means across credibility, believability, satisfaction, and productivity, but none reached statistical significance. Fair/Unfair and Accurate/Inaccurate yielded larger effect-size estimates (Cohen’s d = 0.72 and 0.70); however, these exploratory estimates require cautious interpretation given the small sample. Overall, the findings suggest that graduate engineering students engage with the tool in nuanced and adaptive ways that extend beyond simple dependence or acceptance of AI-generated outputs. The study highlights the importance of instructional and prompting strategies that foster reflective, verification-oriented, and responsible AI-assisted learning practices in engineering education.
