Exploring Indonesian academics’ engagement with communities of practice of publications of research results in international journals

The study seeks to gain an understanding of the extent to which the geopolitical context affects the international academic publication practices of Indonesian academics, an under-researched population of academia in South East Asia which belongsto one of the largest country by population in the world, yet peripheral economicallyand linguistically, and which is in its inaugural process of escalating its publication performance internationally. By drawing on the concept of Communities of Practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998), this thesis understands the international academic community as a community of practice. This thesis enquires the engagement of Indonesian scholars to the international academic communities through their publications in English-medium international journals. By adopting a mixed-method design as the methodological framework, which combines a questionnaire with 3 qualitative case studies, this thesis investigates the endeavour, the motives and the circumstances that affect these scholars’ ability to publish in English-medium international journals. The main findings of the study show that publication was constrained by: a.) shortages of material resources, such as online journals and; b.) lack of knowledge of specific strategies for research and the writing and publication for international journals. The strategies used include joint-publication, proofreading, and literature review research. Despite these findings most academics privileged publication in English/international journals compared to publication in national journals. Their motives were mainly scholarly recognition and career advancement rather than enriching the available theory in the disciplines. Another finding was that the participants who did achieve publication in international journals were those with active networks of overseas scholars; in particular, those engaged in joint-publication with Anglophone scholars were able to publish in higher-rank centre journals, while