Science as a progressive tradition in danish educational research

I have checked the amount of citations of the 70 included, qualitative studies, from two danish journals of educational/pedagogical research.

In total the 70 articles have in all 95 citations. These are articles going back to 2018. Excluding those published in 2022 (current year), they have a collected 94 citations. And among these one freak outlier (Hilli, C., Nørgård, R. T., & Aaen, J. H. (2019)) has 40 citations. Most of which are from articles by second author R. T. Nørgård. 

14 of the articles from before 2022, have more than one citations. 7 have more than two.

A total of 20 articles (-2022) called for further research. Of these 9 have no citations. 

This fact taken together with what i have also shown for this dataset (only three articles with testable hypotheses, only seven articles making no unwarranted statistically general claims), indicates a lack of scientific progress for the articles included. That is all qualitative research articles published in the two journals for the last four years. 

I do not in general think that our scientific system is healthy and that the incentive to keep publishing and getting citations is good. The lack of citations here noted however, i think does indicate, for this dataset, that despite calls for more research, scientific progression seldom takes off. Most of the time no one is consistently building upon the research in this dataset. 

It seems plausible that one reason for this is the lack of hypotheses. It indicates a lack of actual theories consisting of testable hypotheses. Theories that can be worked on by multiple research units in a scientific progression.

In the segment of danish educational research that i have collected and read, it seems that every study is concerned with different things and theoretical frameworks as distinguished from testable hypotheses related to theories about the world (education, learning, pedagogy etc.).

Hypothetically, even if another qualitative study is similar to one that i am making, what reasons will i have to try and build on its results, if the theoretical framework and the analytical tools are different to mine? I would need something like a clearly stated, testable hypothesis if i were to use different methods to study the same subject. This would also be the case if i were to use the same methods. Even if the analytical constructs i use to analyse interviews were worded similarly to those of another study, i could never be certain that the statements from the interviews were meant in the same way, and thus sortable according to the same constructs, or even that those constructs are used in the same way. A shared, testable hypothesis, would at least mitigate some of the uncertainties, due to there being a shared, clearly stated purpose. 

As i wrote here a common defence of qualitative research against the charge that it cannot be used to falsify hypotheses, is that it can in fact do just that. So the question becomes, for the present dataset, if this is the case, where are the hypotheses?