• 1 Katy Börner, Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know, Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 2010; Rollan (...)

1During the last few decades, scientific research has changed the ways and means by which it communicates its results remarkably. This means that there is an urgent need to change the limits of each and every scientific field, as they seem to have become increasingly blurred. History of Education (HE) could not and does not remain oblivious to the transformations in the dissemination of research, thus we should focus on becoming aware of these processes and understanding them within the current scientific context1.

• 2 Agustín Escolano (ed.), “Nuevas tendencias en Historia de la Educación”, Historia de la educación. (...)
• 3 Jeroen J.H. Dekker, Frank Simon, “Shaping the history of education? The first 50 years of Paedagog (...)
• 4 Pierre Caspard, “Vingt années d’Histoire de l’éducation”, Histoire de l’éducation, no. 85, 2000, p (...)
• 5 Roberto Sani, “History of Education & Children’s Literature and the internationalization of histor (...)
• 6 Simonetta Polenghi, Gianfranco Bandini, “The history of education in its own light: signs of crisi (...)

2It is also common practice to take advantage of the anniversaries of a journal or an institution to look back and see how a scientific field has changed over a period of time. That is why, on its 25^th anniversary, the journal History of Education dedicated its monograph to the analysis of some of the “New Trends in the History of Education”2 and, on its 50th anniversary, Historical Pedagogy published an extra issue dedicated to the “Shaping the history of education? The first 50 years of Paedagogica Historica”3. A similar approach, led Pierre Caspard to assess the situation of Histoire de l’éducation in 20004, History of Education & Children’s Literature to dedicate a monograph to “The role of scientific journals in the development and internationalization of historical and educational research”5 and for Espacio, Tiempo y Educación to publish the monograph “The History of Education looking at itself”6.

• 7 Marta Ruiz-Corbella, Arturo Galán, Alfonso Diestro, “Las revistas científicas de educación en Espa (...)
• 8 See, Carlos Eduardo Vieira, José Gonçalves Gondra, “Revista Brasileira de História da Educação: tr (...)
• 9 Francisco Canales Serrano, Yasmina Álvarez González, María José Tacoronte Domínguez, “La Historia (...)

3Our research is part of the Standing Working Group (SWG) “Mapping the History of Education Discipline” of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE). Launched in London in 2014, this SWG has been conceived as a large-scale research project to collectively carry out a retrospective analysis of the evolution of the history of education. In this area, for instance, new works are emerging relating to the changes in scientific publications, especially in journals7, which evidently include open, digital, peer-reviewed publications, etc.8, and to changes related to the inclusion of the History of Education in the academic curriculum9 The study of doctoral theses plays a major role in this ambitious project as, together with journals, scientific associations, conferences, professorships, museums, archives, curriculum subjects, etc., it helps us learn about the specific configuration of HE and its dynamics, always bearing in mind both its changes and continuities.

• 10 Eulàlia Fuentes Pujol, Llorenç Arguimbau Vivo, “Las tesis doctorales en España (1997-2008): anális (...)
• 11 Andrés Fernández Bautista, Manuel Torralba, Antonio Fernández-Cano, “Análisis longitudinal de tesi (...)
• 12 Virgínia Ferrer, Júlia Parrilla, M. José Rubio, Juana M. Sancho, “Estudi sobre l’investigació doct (...)
• 13 Antonio Fernández-Cano, Manuel Torralbo, Mónica Vallejo, “Revisión prospectiva de la producción es (...)
• 14 Elvira Curiel-Marín, Antonio Fernández-Cano, « “Problemática de la investigación con tesis doctora (...)
• 15 Elena Fernández Rey, Rebeca García Murias, “La producción científica en tesis doctorales sobre apr (...)
• 16 Francisco Javier Ramos Pardo, Pablo Sánchez Antolín, “Production of educational theory doctoral th (...)
• 17 Carmen Sanchidrián, Fátima Ortega, “Revisión historiográfica de las tesis realizadas sobre histori (...)
• 18 Dissertations and theses Universidad Complutense de Madrid: <https://ucm.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1057 (...)

4Doctoral theses have already been the subject of study, specifically in the work of Fuentes and Arguimbau which is a reference point for any research in this field10. Important works have been analysing theses on education since 184011 and there are also bibliometric studies on doctoral theses in Science of Education that were defended at the University of Barcelona over ten years12 or in Spain between 1976 and 200613. We can also find works on fields such as the Teaching of Social Sciences 14, service-learning15 or Theory of Education16. However, doctoral theses have hardly ever been analysed from an HE point of view17. A first approach can be found in “Relación de tesis doctorales” [“Report of Doctoral Theses”] (1982), according to which, the first thesis was the one presented in 1940 by Víctor García Hoz on El concepto de lucha en la ascética española y la educación de la juventud [The concept of struggle in Spanish asceticism and the education of youth], defended at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of Complutense University of Madrid and supervised by Juan Zaragüeta18.

• 19 Andrés Payà, Xavier Motilla, “Web 2.0, social networks and the history of education in Spain: crea (...)

5All scientific disciplines have their own history, nonetheless there are factors that have had a strong influence on all fields. It is important to recognise the profound changes that have taken place in the last few decades in the teaching praxis of history of science, with the arrival of information and communication technology19 on the one hand, and in the policies of university teaching staff accreditation and the appointment of teaching staff, on the other. For the purpose of our research, all these changes affect, for instance, the method of consulting sources, and of generating and disseminating research results, but also the ways in which doctoral theses are carried out. The legislation, on the other hand, has been responding to the new demands and while in the past the discussions were about doctoral courses and doctoral theses, now we speak of Doctoral Schools, activities, research stays, international doctorates, theses by compendium and publications realised during the doctoral thesis, among other matters that previously did not form part of the daily life of the pre-doctoral researchers. The new regulations have brought new rhythms and activities into the thesis writing process. It was not uncommon in our field for people to say that they had been working on their doctoral thesis for ten or fifteen years; or rather, not working on it, as it has been demonstrated that doctoral research is an intense and extensive activity that cannot be successfully carried out without due dedication and without keeping up-to-date with new publications on that specific subject. In this respect, the doctoral theses that are carried out in a particular country during a specific period of time are an excellent indicator of the state of research in a certain field, not only because of the topics or periods of time studied, but also because they allow us to take stock of the aforementioned changes in university policy.

• 20 This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, through the project (...)

6In this article we will focus on institutional aspects: where HE theses were written over the last twenty-five years, in which fields and who supervised them20.

• 21 Online: <https://www.educacion.gob.es/teseo/irGestionarConsulta.do>.

7We worked with the theses that in the TESEO database (part of the Spanish Ministry of Education)21, include the descriptor “History of Education” (subdiscipline 550607 History of Education, according to UNESCO nomenclature) from the years 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015. Due to the high number of doctoral theses defended in Spain in the period studied, we opted to take these years as a sample that offers the possibility of knowing the state of the question regarding the production of history of education theses. This work differs from other studies of this nature in the thesis selection criteria which, in this case, were determined by the authors themselves as they considered that their own theses belonged to this specific scientific field. Although the in-depth yearly analysis of the last quarter of a century on the reading and defence of HE doctoral theses is still pending, we have chosen the theses which were defended in these six timeframes of our contemporary history in order to make the study operational, and to detect, key moments or points of inflection if there are any, which a future qualitative study can focus on. Thus, this article is a longitudinal analysis, whose intention is to illustrate the afore-mentioned institutional aspects in order to approach a specific reality in Spanish historical-educational research.

• 22 Carmen Sanchidrián Blanco, “Tesis de Historia de la Educación en la base de datos TESEO (España, 2 (...)

8We have analysed 198 theses. Given the selection criterion it is possible there are HE theses where the author has not used the HE descriptor and so accordingly they are not included or trackable via this criterion in the database consulted . At the time of writing, a doctoral thesis is being produced with the aim of creating a list of theses that have been completed at Spanish universities in the History of Education, regardless of the descriptor with which they appear. The TESEO database is an excellent starting point for this work, but it also has limitations22. Graph 1 shows the theses included in TESEO that have the HE descriptor, ranging from 1977, when the first one appears in this database, until 21 November 2019. Data from theses prior to 1977 are therefore located in other databases that can be considered complementary to the TESEO database from that year onwards. It should be noted that some theses can hardly be classified as HE just because they are so described in TESEO, due to the fact that they deal with current issues on education that have been catalogued as “short duration”; however, as their authors have tagged them as HE, we have not excluded them. Such theses should be further investigated (at least the index, introduction, conclusions and sources) to be able to decide if we can really use them for our purpose.

• 23 Carmen Sanchidrián Blanco, “Institutional affiliations and socialization: Doctoral Thesis in Histo (...)

9If we look at these data, which are grouped by periods of time, in graph 2, we can see the growth experienced by HE in the last three decades, parallel to that experienced by theses in education. It is true that in the sixties and seventies, and before that, there were HE theses, but clearly the growth of the university system in Spain also meant a strong increase in doctoral theses. In addition, the creation of faculties of Educational Sciences during the eighties (as a result of the General Education Law of 1970) followed by the change from “University Schools of Teacher Training of Basic General Education” into “Faculties of Education” (in almost all cases, the studies of Educational Sciences or Pedagogy, and the training of teachers were united in the same institution) meant that for many teachers the first step towards a university career was a doctoral thesis. A different case is that of some teachers who had been in teacher training colleges for some time and then, for some reason, decided to write their theses in the field of HE with the aim of improving their administrative status, even if their research career ended on the day of its defence23. The Organic Law on Universities (Ley Orgánica de Universidades, LOU, 2001) –that modified the University Reform Law (Ley de Reforma Universitaria, LRU, 1983)– declared it obligatory to have a Ph.D degree to teach at university; nevertheless, it was not applied in regard to temporary teachers and it was not reflected in the number of theses in the years after it was passed.

• 24 Lola Quero, “El final de los antiguos doctorados causa una gran avalancha en la UGR”, Granada Hoy, (...)
• 25 Olga San Martín, “El rector de la UCM admite fallos en el sistema que han permitido que se “cuelen (...)

11Each University published the regulation of the Doctorate studies in accordance with the R.D. 99/2011. Generally speaking, this reform was put forward with the intention of establishing minimum criteria that would lead to a progressive increase in the quality and impact of the theses defended, as well as of the mechanisms to achieve this goal in a flexible and progressive manner. 11 February 2016 was set as the deadline for the submission of theses that had been started before the R.D. 99/2011 entered into force (Transitional Provision 1 and 2). Even though students who were taking their doctoral degree already knew in 2011 that they had to submit their research within five years, the last three months saw a “flood” or an “avalanche” of theses that even made it into the press with meaningful headlines. For instance, at the University of Granada, almost 600 theses were defended before 11^th February, while the average during a normal academic year was between 450 and 500; at the University of Zaragoza 592 theses were submitted in one semester, as opposed to the 350 in the whole of the previous year and at the University of Malaga 530 theses were submitted between November and 11^th February, the equivalent to those normally processed in two years24. During those months (especially between November 2015 and February 2016) the problems with finding dates, examining boards, etc. meant a decrease in control over the theses, as was evidenced in recent news stating that the Dean of Complutense University admitted that “controls over doctoral theses were relaxed as a result of a change in university regulations” so that some were able “to slip low-quality or plagiarized doctoral theses thorough the system”. “In many cases it was a botched job”25. An analysis of the theses submitted in those months should be carried out because this kind of news is detrimental for many doctoral students who submitted their theses at that time and who met all the quality and control requirements of authors, supervisors and examining boards.

• 26 “Relación de tesis de doctorado de historia de la educación presentadas en las universidades españ (...)
• 27 “Extractos de tesis doctorales sobre Historia de la educación presentadas en las universidades esp (...)

12To better understand the significance of the data of these twenty-five years, we should compare them with the data from previous time periods. The first issue of the journal Historia de la Educación published the list of doctoral theses on the History of Education submitted to Spanish universities between 1940 and 1976 (“Relación de tesis de doctorado de historia de la educación presentadas en las universidades españolas entre 1940 y 1976”)26 which contains seventy-two theses submitted, namely, at the University of Barcelona (fifteen), Madrid (forty-six), Pontifica of Salamanca (six) and Valencia (five). To these a further thirty must be added that were reviewed in the same volume (ten defended at Complutense University of Madrid, eight in Valencia, six in Barcelona, six in Salamanca – four in Pontificia University and two in the public one, and one in Navarra) and that were defended between 1977 and 1981. From this source only, we therefore have 102 HE theses defended between 1940 and 198127. Up to 1976 the average number of theses is fewer than three per year, while over the following five years the average is six per year. It was already a remarkable change, although the figures of the twenty-five years that we have studied in this article obviously belong to a different period.

• 28 “ Memorias de licenciatura leídas en los departamentos de historia de la educación de las universi (...)

13The increase was partially predictable considering that, between 1977 and 1981 (the same period in which thirty theses were submitted as previously mentioned), 101 HE tesinas (master degree dissertations) had been lodged in the HE Departments of Spanish universities: fifty-six in Complutense University, twenty in Barcelona, ten in Valencia, six in Salamanca, five in Navarra, three in Pontificia of Salamanca and one in Palma28.

• 29 However, History of Psychology does not appear. A curious case is that of the History of the Churc (...)

17As mentioned at the beginning, the TESEO database allows the inclusion of several descriptors from the UNESCO scientific fields. As the criterion for being on the list we handled was specifically the inclusion of “History of Education” we should focus on the other descriptors that the authors of the theses included, as well as on the position occupied by each one. HE, like all subjects included by UNESCO in History by specialties (thirty-one in total, from History of Architecture to History of the Church, including Biology, Journalism, Medicine, Science, Sociology, etc.)29 is a “hybrid” discipline that belongs to the field of History, although its teaching does not take place at the faculties of History (in some cases it is mentioned in the history of culture) but in the faculties of Education, which means that it is generally pedagogists, who dedicate themselves to it, as we shall see. This might mean that in the majority of HE theses there are descriptors that may seem logical at first sight, both in the field of history and in the field of education. However, the analysis of the descriptors and their evolution yields partly surprising results. We focused on two descriptors, “History of Education” and “History”, and examined where they appear. In both cases, we specified the first three positions (1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd) and the category “Other” (positions ranging from 4th to 9th).

• 30 Mª Juan Ruiz-Martínez, Mª José Baños-Moreno y Rodrigo Baños-Moreno, “Nomenclatura Unesco: evolució (...)

21The very structure of UNESCO's Nomenclature explains this grouping as the “History of education” sub-discipline (550607) is located in the “History” subject area (55) and in the “Stories by specialties” discipline (5506). The use of UNESCO's descriptors poses problems when defining the scientific profiles of research projects and of the researchers30 who need to include a History profile when they are actually dealing with Pedagogy. If we wished to use Pedagogy descriptors because we consider that this is the field where a thesis should be located (58), we would have to place the thesis according to the subject of study (for example, 580302 is Teacher Training or 580204 is Education Levels and Topics) or in the “Other” section. For our purpose this is clearly insufficient as we approach educational issues from a historical perspective.

• 31 The Rector of Complutense University stated: “There were doctoral theses supervised by people who (...)

27The theses that are based on the Theory and History of Education (the area of knowledge to which HE belongs) do stand out, but with a clear downward trend. Overall, those written in education departments account for 70% of the total. There are some situations that are difficult to explain, such as the fact that in 2015 there were almost as many theses from HE as from other areas of education. There are theses carried out in Departments of Didactics and School Organization or didactics of specific subjects, that allegedly belong to HE, as they are tagged with the HE descriptor in the first and often only place, despite the fact that neither the supervisor/s nor anyone in the committee that evaluated them are involved in HE. This relevant factor, i.e. the thesis supervisor's lack of specialization in HE, usually has an impact on the final result of the thesis, as the methodological shortcomings and the superficiality with which they approach the topics without going deeper or reaching relevant conclusions, directly affect the quality and scientific rigor of the doctoral theses in question31.

• 32 Antonio Viñao Frago, “From dictatorship to democracy history of education in Spain”, Paedagogica H (...)

32This may be explained by the impetus that so-called “local histories” had in the eighties and nineties in the 20^th century that goes beyond a mere interest in a historiographic orientation towards social history, history from below, microhistory, or local histories, among others. The real reasons for this choice lie in the changes that Pedagogical studies underwent in those years: the so-called regional histories were included following the development of the Autonomous Communities: History of education in Andalusia, Valencia, Galicia, Catalonia, Valencia the Basque Country, etc. This fact undoubtedly encouraged local History of Education theses carried out from the place studied. They had the advantage that most of the primary sources were easily accessible to researchers. There are quite a few theses that study local education, focusing either on an educational level (for example, La enseñanza primaria en Málaga, 1902-1931 [The History of Primary Education in Malaga, 1902-1931], or La Formación Profesional en Navarra, 1946-1990 [Vocational Education in Navarra, 1946-1990], or Cien años de enseñanza secundaria en Cervera, 1845-1941 [One hundred years of secondary education in Cervera, 1845-1941], or else adopting a rather general perspective (for example, Escuela, educación e infancia durante la Guerra Civil en Euskadi [School, education and childhood in the Basque Country during the Spanish Civil War] or La enseñanza en Cuenca durante la II República y la Guerra Civil española [The Education in Cuenca during the 2^nd republic and the Civil War]. Another significant group focuses on an educational institution, especially in the Provincial High Schools or Normal Schools (for instance, Historia del Instituto “Santísima Trinidad” de Baeza, 1869-1953 [The History of “Santísima Trinidad” High School of Baeza, 1869-1953] or La escuela Normal de Maestros de Las Palmas, 1853-1900 [The Teacher Training College of Las Palmas, 1853-1900]. The thoughts and works of individual authors are also among the favorite topics (Andrés Bello, Ángel Ganivet, Champagnat, Manjón, Sáez de Melgar, etc.) Among those theses in which Spain is not the focus of study, the national perspective clearly prevails over the local one (15.66 vs. 6.57%). These results are consistent with the opinions offered by Viñao about HE research in Spain during the last decades32.

• 33 Carmen Sanchidrián Blanco, La historia cultural de la educación: Entre cambios y continuidades, Má (...)
• 34 Antonio Viñao Frago, “La historia de la educación en el siglo XX. Una mirada desde España”, Revist (...)
• 35 Ibid.

42The analysis of the descriptors must be interpreted in relation to the subject field from which the theses arise. We have seen how the descriptor “History of Education” has been gaining ground, from appearing in secondary positions to being the first in recent years. The evolution followed by HE in recent decades can explain these changes, especially because of its approach to the theories, methods and concepts of history, which allows educational historians to state openly that they deal with HE and not only with History33. The inclusion of History of Education or History in the first places indicates the field of origin of the researcher, and generally it does not imply different conceptual approaches because we all understand historical science. However, for a long time HE was a repertoire of decontextualized theories or studies of institutions, often also out of context, aimed at teacher training rather than at a scientific discipline, although always with notable exceptions. The decline suffered by both Pedagogy and History until the sixties means that we have to wait until the seventies to find “theses and research that were more receptive to the new historiographic trends, a situation that climaxed at the end of the seventies or the beginning of the eighties”34. These works, close to the historiographic trends that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, together with the institutional consolidation of the discipline, its expansion and the greater attention paid to educational issues by historians in general35 (very interested in the history of childhood or the history of literacy, for example) make it possible to situate the scientific and historiographic renewal of HE at the end of the 1970s. This may explain why we have had to wait a few years for educational historians to be recognized as such, rather than as historians interested in educational issues.

• 36 Rita Hofstetter, Alexandre Fontaine, Solenn Huitric, Emmanuelle Picard, “Mapping the discipline hi (...)

44Without taking into account the descriptors, in many cases it is not easy to decide whether a thesis, or an article or a book belong to HE. According to Mapping36 and other projects, it is a pre-requisite for theses to have a clear historical element and that the research focus on an educational subject. For the HE mapping, the fact that certain theses have been qualified as “History of Education” and also the fact that HE theses do not include this descriptor, is the biggest limitation when using the TESEO database. Although we have not accessed the content of the theses, there are several that would hardly be qualified as History of Education by an education historian. Some of them do not look like theses about history and with others it is difficult to gauge the chosen topic. This can be “ explained” by administrative reasons, for example, when in a department there are several subject areas, the theses defended in that Department might take its name, even if they are not about the subject.

• 37 Antonio Fernández-Cano, Manuel Torralbo, Mónica Vallejo, “Revisión prospectiva de la producción es (...)
• 38 Andrés Fernández Bautista, Manuel Torralba, Antonio Fernández-Cano, “Análisis longitudinal…”, op.  (...)

50Finally, we can say that in the same way that “education as a doctoral subject has grown significantly over time, following patterns similar to those of other disciplines”37 and that its development has been subject to the ups and downs and influences of Spanish research in general, HE has also followed similar patterns and to a large extent, has been affected, by the same factors that have affected research in general. Broadly speaking, the same stages that are set in other studies of theses in education can be applied to HE. Therefore, research in HE is not an exceptional case, although the interpretation of the results obviously needs to take into account the peculiarities of its field38.