Mapping history of education via scientific journals

The current state of an academic discipline, including of course the field of History of Education, cannot be measured through research output alone; we must also examine the degree to which it has become institutionalised. The central criteria for ‘measuring’ a discipline must therefore include professorships, specialist organisations, university study programmes and numbers of enrolled students, number of publications and student theses, but also the scope and influence of the field’s respective professional journals. The institutionalisation of history of education research began in the 1970s with the creation of corresponding professorships, the inclusion of the History of Education into university courses and the establishment in many countries of national professional associations and journals on history of education. This trend was linked to criticism of historiographic traditions and coincided with the thematic diversification of the history of education content. The beginning of the 1990s, however, marked a period where the field declined in significance at university level. In English-speaking countries initially and then later across numerous European countries, history of education research was almost entirely forced out of higher education institutions for many different reasons such as policy decisions or reductions in teacher training, institutional changes, the stronger emphasis on teaching practice, the declining prestige of History in the Education sciences, the precarious academic status of pedagogy and financial pressures during periods of recession and social transformation. Since then crises in history of education research have been declared at regular intervals and fundamental issues such as content, purpose and perspectives of this field have been debated. Irrespective of all pronouncements of crisis, an examination of the growth of the market for education history journals demonstrates not only they constitute an important means of professional communication but also they represent a constitutive element of an institutionalised academic discipline.