EMI: Who's studying whom? A critical bibliometric analysis of authorship and citation patterns in English medium instruction research

Interest in English as a Medium of Instruction has, since 2005, become a huge area of applied linguistics research, but who gets to talk about EMI and who are they talking about? This paper describes a critical bibliometric analysis uncovering geographical and institutional imbalances in EMI research. We map over 1,000 higher education EMI journal articles to describe a research landscape dominated by wealthy nations and former colonial powers, with citations flowing disproportionately toward the Global North. Linear regression analysis shows that geography and the wealth, to a troubling extent, predict how productive that country is in terms of papers and particularly how well cited those papers are. We conclude that these findings reveal an epistemic bias which risks reinforcing academic structural inequities, particularly when it comes to attempts to holistically summarise the findings of EMI research.