Two growth regimes in educational knowledge production: A comparative bibliometric analysis of education research in Malaysia and Pakistan in 2000 to 2025

Education research in the Global South has expanded rapidly, yet the structural properties of this expansion remain poorly documented outside a handful of large systems. This study compares the volume, impact, structure, and thematic composition of educational research produced in Malaysia and Pakistan between 2000 and 2025. Using the full-text OpenAlex index, 47,505 records classified in the education subfield and affiliated with institutions in the two countries were retrieved and analyzed (Malaysia = 35,928; Pakistan = 11,577). Performance analysis, Lotka and Bradford modelling, collaboration analysis, and topic profiling were applied, with Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) used as the principal normalised indicator. Both systems grew explosively but under different regimes: Malaysia grew at a compound annual rate of 20.8% and now specializes heavily in education (Activity Index = 1.81), whereas Pakistan grew faster but from a much smaller base (23.0% for 2010–2025; doubling time 3.3 years) and remains under-specialized in education relative to its national output (Activity Index = 0.73). Impact diverged sharply: mean FWCI was 2.33 for Malaysia and 1.72 for Pakistan, with 41.4% and 57.7% of records respectively uncited. In both systems, the citation distribution was extremely concentrated (Gini = 0.820 and 0.875), and author productivity was steeper than Lotka's inverse-square law predicts (fitted exponents of 4.15 and 5.93; Kolmogorov–Smirnov D exceeding critical values in both cases), indicating a large transient author population. International co-authorship carried a substantial premium, more than doubling the normalized impact in Pakistan (FWCI 1.18 domestic vs. 3.29 international). Bilateral Malaysia–Pakistan co-authorship remained thin (416 papers, 0.9% of the combined corpus) but outperformed both national means (FWCI = 3.49). The findings suggest that publication volume in both systems has decoupled from citation visibility and that policy attention should shift from output targets toward collaboration infrastructure and venue quality.