Exploring Academic Culture: Unpacking its Definition and Structure (A Systematic Scoping Review)

Abstract

Background: The concept of academic culture lacks a standardised definition, and the factors defining it have not been clearly outlined or universally agreed upon. To analyse this phenomenon accurately, a precise definition of academic culture is necessary. This scoping review aims to synthesise literature on academic culture, delineate its epidemiological characteristics, and extract empirical descriptions of factors that contribute to the formation and structure of academic culture. Method: A search was conducted in the bibliographic database Scopus on August 2nd, 2023. Additionally, a search for related grey literature was carried out on August 3rd, 2023. We included studies published in English post-2018 that discuss academic culture. Titles and abstracts from the retrieved records were screened for relevance. Demographic characteristics related to academic culture were extracted from all search records. We then extracted statements from empirical and review studies describing empirically derived factors influencing the formation and defining the architecture of academic culture. These factors were categorised and thematically grouped, and the identified structural components were ranked according to the internal hierarchy of academic culture. Results: The search yielded 961 records, out of which 94 met our inclusion criteria. The majority of these records were journal articles, book chapters or reviews (78.44%), with only 23 records being empirical studies, reviews and book chapters that reported definitions and academic culture structure. Conclusion: This study pinpointed key structural components of the architecture of academic culture, categorised existing definitions of academic culture into subgroups. Additionally, it outlined the principal research directions for studying the academic culture of researchers. The limitations of this work include its focus solely on English language articles and the lack of assessment regarding the methodological quality of the articles included in our data extraction.