Higher Education Policy, 2015, 28, (411–417) © 2015 International Association of Universities 0952-8733/15 www.palgrave-journals.com/hep/ Higher Education Research in East Asia: Regional and National Evolution and Path-Dependencies Hugo Horta a , Jisun Jung a and Akiyoshi Yonezawa b a Division of Policy, Administration and Social Sciences Education, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, China. E-mails: hugo.horta@ist.utl.pt; horta@hku.hk; jisun@hku.hk b Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan. E-mail: yonezawa@gsid.nagoya-u.ac.jp Higher Education Policy (2015) 28, 411–417. doi:10.1057/hep.2015.12 Keywords: East Asia; higher education research; special issue; research community; higher education development; path dependencies Introduction The scant knowledge of the regional landscape in higher education research as a field of study in Asia motivated this special issue. The characterization and analysis of the evolution of higher education research and its communities has been mostly focused in North America and Europe. This is expected since these were the regions of the world first striving for and attaining universal higher education systems (Trow, 2007). Higher education research, including that oriented towards the international research community, developed more inten- sively in these regions as they struggled to cope with varied — sometimes unexpected — complex challenges of fast-paced transforming higher education systems since the 1960s (Teichler, 2006). This special issue contributes to the literature by providing theoretical, historical, and empirical perspectives con- cerning the development of higher education research in East Asia. Its contents are expected to inform discussions about past, present, and future developments of higher education research in this region of the world. Asian economies have developed distinct, but vibrant, higher education models (Marginson et al., 2011). Japan realized the first massified Asian higher education system. It did so based on a large private sector since the mid-1970s. Twenty-first century Korea is the top runner of universal participation in higher