The study combines a bibliometric approach with a content analysis of abstracts of articles to explore the patterns of international comparative higher education research in leading international journals. The overall data set covers 4,095 publications from the Web of Science for the period 1992-2012 and the amount of international comparative articles in this data set is analyzed utilizing a geographical coding. Contrary to a general proliferation of international and global trends in higher education, the results of the analysis most importantly reveal a relatively steady state of international comparative higher education research over the past 20 years. Further patterns examined show that international collaborative articles have a much higher share in international comparative research compared to non-comparative research, small-scale country clusters are preferred for comparison and there is a dense network of comparative clusters between Europe and the US. Finally, rationales for these patterns are discussed, as well as potential implications.