A Study Of Roles Of An Academic Journal In Research

Academic journals play an important role in the academic research, so academic circles also pay more and more attention to the Journal evaluation. At present, the quantitative indicators, such as Journal impact factor is mainly adopted in evaluation of journals, which sparked controversy for points of "quantitative orientation" or "journals reviewing articles". In this context, the journal of Research in Higher Education of Engineering ranked higher in all kinds of journal evaluation year after year in recently 11 years. This research attempts to explore the development of the journal from the point of that how academic journals influence the academic research, which maybe a breakthrough of the pure quantitative method to evaluate journals.This research mainly uses the method of Content Analysis which including the steps of determining the units of analysis, constructing the categories and coding the variables.By reading the 1840 articles of the journal of Research in Higher Education of Engineering from the year 2004 to 2014, the the authors and their belonging institutions,the research paradigms and methods, the research content of these articles were classified to different categories of the units. With the help of the software SPSS, the results of the frequencies and cross statistics of the data already collected show that:In recently 11 years,(1)the rate of the co-authored papers and the proportion of professors title authors of the journal of Research in Higher Education of Engineering increased obviously, and the authors affiliation extended from “985” universities to general universities or higher vocational colleges;(2)research paradigm was still dominated by Thinking Paradigm, but its rate had been declining year by year, by contrast, the Empirical Paradigm is significantly increased, at the same time, data collection methods, the description of research methods, literature review and other statements reflecting the norm of Empirical Paradigm were more and more normative;Action Research was the new form of research methods recently;(3)as the term of the research content, research papers on the school level and the national level accounted for most percentage; the relations of practice and theoretical oriented research was meaningful; Teaching and Scientific research, Knowledge and the Course which were two themes partial to micro level accounted for a larger proportion.Based on the analysis of the data, it is obvious that the journal of Research in Higher Education of Engineering effectively promote the emergence of the benign cycle of the researcher, research paradigm and research contents which is the main reason for the development of journal. Besides, the thoughts of running the journal, the reviewing system and editor's role are the important reasons why the journal play an effective role in the academic research.