Ben Williamson

9.6k total citations · 7 hit papers
116 papers, 5.4k citations indexed

About

Ben Williamson is a scholar working on Education, Information Systems and Political Science and International Relations. According to data from OpenAlex, Ben Williamson has authored 116 papers receiving a total of 5.4k indexed citations (citations by other indexed papers that have themselves been cited), including 26 papers in Education, 24 papers in Information Systems and 21 papers in Political Science and International Relations. Recurrent topics in Ben Williamson's work include Online Learning and Analytics (17 papers), Global Educational Policies and Reforms (16 papers) and Digital Education and Society (15 papers). Ben Williamson is often cited by papers focused on Online Learning and Analytics (17 papers), Global Educational Policies and Reforms (16 papers) and Digital Education and Society (15 papers). Ben Williamson collaborates with scholars based in United Kingdom, United States and Germany. Ben Williamson's co-authors include Rebecca Eynon, John Potter, Deborah Lupton, Siân Bayne, Carlo Perrotta, Felicitas Macgilchrist, Anna Hogan, Suellen Shay, Jeremy Knox and Kalervo Ν. Gulson and has published in prestigious journals such as Bioinformatics, Radiographics and New Media & Society.

In The Last Decade

Ben Williamson

110 papers receiving 5.1k citations

Hit Papers

Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: di... 2015 2026 2018 2022 2020 2015 2017 2017 2020 100 200 300 400 500
What are hit papers?

Hit papers significantly outperform the citation benchmark for their cohort. A paper qualifies if it has ≥500 total citations, achieves ≥1.5× the top-1% citation threshold for papers in the same subfield and year (this is the minimum needed to enter the top 1%, not the average within it), or reaches the top citation threshold in at least one of its specific research topics.

  1. Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: digital technologies and distance education during the coronavirus emergency
    2020 595 citations Ben Williamson, Rebecca Eynon et al. Learning Media and Technology profile →
  2. Digital education governance: data visualization, predictive analytics, and ‘real-time’ policy instruments
    2015 312 citations Ben Williamson profile →
  3. Big Data in Education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice
    2017 308 citations Ben Williamson profile →
  4. The datafied child: The dataveillance of children and implications for their rights
    2017 268 citations Ben Williamson et al. profile →
  5. Historical threads, missing links, and future directions in AI in education
    2020 249 citations Ben Williamson, Rebecca Eynon Learning Media and Technology profile →
  6. The datafication of teaching in Higher Education: critical issues and perspectives
    2020 166 citations Ben Williamson et al. profile →
  7. Making markets through digital platforms: Pearson, edu-business, and the (e)valuation of higher education
    2020 144 citations Ben Williamson Critical Studies in Education profile →

Peers — A (Enhanced Table)

Peers by citation overlap · career bar shows stage (early→late) cites · hero ref

Name h Career Trend Papers Cites
Ben Williamson United Kingdom 40 1.8k 1.6k 1.3k 1.2k 720 116 5.4k
Rebecca Eynon United Kingdom 31 1.6k 0.9× 1.1k 0.7× 1.3k 1.0× 732 0.6× 264 0.4× 70 4.2k
Olaf Zawacki‐Richter Germany 27 2.4k 1.3× 1.4k 0.9× 446 0.3× 2.0k 1.7× 258 0.4× 85 5.6k
Bill Cope United States 37 3.9k 2.2× 948 0.6× 1.7k 1.3× 664 0.6× 285 0.4× 181 9.0k
Yong Zhao United States 36 3.7k 2.1× 957 0.6× 1.4k 1.1× 526 0.4× 276 0.4× 131 5.8k
Bart Rienties United Kingdom 45 3.6k 2.0× 852 0.5× 575 0.4× 2.5k 2.1× 359 0.5× 198 6.2k
Karl Maton Australia 26 2.1k 1.2× 793 0.5× 2.2k 1.7× 408 0.3× 610 0.8× 58 4.8k
George Veletsianos Canada 35 2.0k 1.1× 914 0.6× 1.2k 1.0× 1.1k 1.0× 98 0.1× 130 4.4k
Chang Zhu Belgium 36 3.4k 1.9× 1.4k 0.9× 589 0.5× 832 0.7× 192 0.3× 240 5.2k
Jeff Seaman United States 25 5.6k 3.2× 1.0k 0.7× 913 0.7× 2.0k 1.7× 199 0.3× 45 7.8k
Thomas C. Reeves United States 43 5.0k 2.8× 1.3k 0.8× 900 0.7× 1.4k 1.2× 170 0.2× 183 7.8k

Countries citing papers authored by Ben Williamson

Since Specialization
Citations

This map shows the geographic impact of Ben Williamson's research. It shows the number of citations coming from papers published by authors working in each country. You can also color the map by specialization and compare the number of citations received by Ben Williamson with the expected number of citations based on a country's size and research output (numbers larger than one mean the country cites Ben Williamson more than expected).

Fields of papers citing papers by Ben Williamson

Since Specialization
Physical SciencesHealth SciencesLife SciencesSocial Sciences

This network shows the impact of papers produced by Ben Williamson. Nodes represent research fields, and links connect fields that are likely to share authors. Colored nodes show fields that tend to cite the papers produced by Ben Williamson. The network helps show where Ben Williamson may publish in the future.

Co-authorship network of co-authors of Ben Williamson

This figure shows the co-authorship network connecting the top 25 collaborators of Ben Williamson. A scholar is included among the top collaborators of Ben Williamson based on the total number of citations received by their joint publications. Widths of edges represent the number of papers authors have co-authored together. Node borders signify the number of papers an author published with Ben Williamson. Ben Williamson is excluded from the visualization to improve readability, since they are connected to all nodes in the network.

All Works

20 of 20 papers shown
1.
Decuypere, Mathias, et al.. (2025). ‘Enthuse and inspire’: edtech brokers and the affective construction of teacher innovation. International Studies in Sociology of Education. 1–17.
2.
Eynon, Rebecca, Cathy Lewin, Felicitas Macgilchrist, et al.. (2025). Looking back and looking forward: past and present editors on 20 years of critical perspectives in learning, media, and technology. Learning Media and Technology. 50(2). 103–111.
3.
Williamson, Ben, Felicitas Macgilchrist, & John Potter. (2025). Knowledge infrastructure crisis: digital democratic deficits and alternative designs for education. Oxford Review of Education. 51(6). 936–952. 1 indexed citations
4.
James, T., Ben Williamson, Peter Tiňo, & Nicole E. Wheeler. (2025). Whole-genome phenotype prediction with machine learning: open problems in bacterial genomics. Bioinformatics. 41(7). 1 indexed citations
5.
Williamson, Ben, et al.. (2024). Edtech brokers and evidence governance: knowledge intermediaries in the education technology market. Globalisation Societies and Education. 1–12. 3 indexed citations
6.
Williamson, Ben, Felicitas Macgilchrist, & John Potter. (2024). Against contextlessness in Learning, Media and Technology. Learning Media and Technology. 49(3). 335–338. 16 indexed citations
7.
Macgilchrist, Felicitas, John Potter, & Ben Williamson. (2024). Challenging the inequitable impacts of edtech. Learning Media and Technology. 49(2). 147–150. 2 indexed citations
8.
Williamson, Ben, Felicitas Macgilchrist, & John Potter. (2024). Near future academic publishing – a speculative social science fiction experiment. Learning Media and Technology. 49(4). 523–526. 3 indexed citations
9.
Komljenovič, Janja, Ben Williamson, Rebecca Eynon, & Huw Davies. (2023). When public policy ‘fails’ and venture capital ‘saves’ education: Edtech investors as economic and political actors. Globalisation Societies and Education. 1–16. 18 indexed citations
10.
Williamson, Ben, Felicitas Macgilchrist, & John Potter. (2023). Re-examining AI, automation and datafication in education. Learning Media and Technology. 48(1). 1–5. 75 indexed citations
11.
Williamson, Ben. (2023). The Social life of AI in Education. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education. 34(1). 97–104. 42 indexed citations
12.
Macgilchrist, Felicitas, John Potter, & Ben Williamson. (2022). Reading internationally: if citing is a political practice, who are we reading and who are we citing?. Learning Media and Technology. 47(4). 407–412. 6 indexed citations
13.
Williamson, Ben, et al.. (2022). Amazon and the New Global Connective Architectures of Education Governance. Harvard Educational Review. 92(2). 231–256. 42 indexed citations
14.
Macgilchrist, Felicitas, John Potter, & Ben Williamson. (2021). Shifting scales of research on learning, media and technology. Learning Media and Technology. 46(4). 369–376. 19 indexed citations
15.
Williamson, Ben, Felicitas Macgilchrist, & John Potter. (2021). Covid-19 controversies and critical research in digital education. Learning Media and Technology. 46(2). 117–127. 52 indexed citations
16.
Perrotta, Carlo, et al.. (2020). Automation, APIs and the distributed labour of platform pedagogies in Google Classroom. Critical Studies in Education. 62(1). 97–113. 108 indexed citations
17.
Beer, David G., et al.. (2019). Landscape summary: Online targeting: What is online targeting, what impact does it have, and how can we maximise benefits and minimise harms?. ORCA Online Research @Cardiff (Cardiff University). 1 indexed citations
18.
Williamson, Ben, John Potter, & Rebecca Eynon. (2019). New research problems and agendas in learning, media and technology: the editors’ wishlist. Learning Media and Technology. 44(2). 87–91. 68 indexed citations
19.
Williamson, Ben. (2019). Policy networks, performance metrics and platform markets: Charting the expanding data infrastructure of higher education. British Journal of Educational Technology. 50(6). 2794–2809. 89 indexed citations
20.
Habous, Mohamad, Gordon Muir, Tarek Soliman, et al.. (2017). Outcomes of variation in technique and variation in accuracy of measurement in penile length measurement. International Journal of Impotence Research. 30(1). 21–26. 23 indexed citations

Rankless uses publication and citation data sourced from OpenAlex, an open and comprehensive bibliographic database. While OpenAlex provides broad and valuable coverage of the global research landscape, it—like all bibliographic datasets—has inherent limitations. These include incomplete records, variations in author disambiguation, differences in journal indexing, and delays in data updates. As a result, some metrics and network relationships displayed in Rankless may not fully capture the entirety of a scholar's output or impact.

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