About the Journal

Focus and Scope

The aim of FIRE: Forum of International Research in Education is to promote interdisciplinary scholarship on the use of internationally comparative data for evidence-based and innovative change in educational system, school, and classroom-level education. FIRE is indexed in EBSCO's Academic Search Premier, Google Scholar, and ERIC.

This focus on evidence-based and innovative change is partly a response to the rapid expansion of national participation in international achievement studies. As a result of these studies, internationally comparative education data and data-driven decision-making has been a hallmark of educational accountability and strategic planning worldwide since the 1960s. Since then the availability and use of international achievement studies for national education policy has exploded, and the most widely adopted studies are now administered on regular cycles and include participating educational systems from every region around the world. The ubiquity of international education data brings the cumbersome, contested, and often-controversial process into the realm of locally-controlled and individually-impactful education.

Although the influence of globalization on educational innovation and social entrepreneurship is significant, there is no universal model for developing an innovation infrastructure or a capacity for social entrepreneurship that benefits local-level education because these systems are so closely linked with contextualized economic demands, social norms and value systems. However, international educational innovation and public sector entrepreneurship have reoriented to reflect global educational trends such as a shared emphasis on access to quality schooling.

FIRE seeks to bring internationally comparative education data and locally-contextualized educational innovation together by publishing scholarship on the ways that evidence-based decision-making using international education data influences innovative educational system-, school- and classroom-level educational change.

Peer Review Process & Indexing

FIRE publishes articles, book reviews, research essays, and bibliographies. Some issues are thematic. Except for book reviews and bibliographies, all manuscripts submitted to FIRE are blind, peer-reviewed. Theoretical and methodological pluralism is welcomed and encouraged by the journal editor and editorial board.

Every manuscript undergoes a blind peer review process by at least two external referees through FIRE’s online submission and reviewer system. Referees receive a reviewer rating sheet that invites them to comment on the manuscript in terms of writing quality, creativity, organization, importance of the problem, content of the literature review, suitability of the data analysis, adequacy of the conclusions, discussion of the limitations, and other relevant categories. Reviewers also provide comments and may track the article with explicit comments and questions. Articles deemed acceptable with minor or major revisions are returned to authors for revision and re-submission. The Editor is responsible for overseeing the peer-review process. Referees are chosen by the Editor based on their research and teaching expertise related to the topics and themes of the submitted manuscripts.

FIRE is indexed in EBSCO's Academic Search Premier, Google Scholar, and ERIC.

Publication Frequency

FIRE is published tri-annually with regular issue articles published immediately upon final acceptance. Special issues are published throughout the year as they are completed.

Author Charges (None)

There are no fees or charges for any author at any time.

Copyright Notice & Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Work published in FIRE: Forum for International Research in Education is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License.

This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access. FIRE ISSN: 2326-3873.

Authors may deposit versions of their work in an institutional or other repository of their choice.