Evolution of topics in education research: a systematic review using bibliometric analysis

ABSTRACT

Education research tends to exhibit interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary characteristics. Based on the subject areas in Google Scholar, within the 51 disciplines under social sciences, nine subjects are directly related to education (early childhood education, education, educational administration, educational psychology & counselling, educational technology, higher education, science & engineering education, special education, teaching & teacher education). The interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary characteristics of education research make it difficult for researchers to identify the overall development of specific topics within the field. In this paper, we first collect core papers from the field of education. Then, we construct keyword co-occurrence networks using these papers. Finally, based on the density distribution of keyword co-occurrence networks, we analyse changes in network density at each stage of educational research. Last, we identify the development trends of core topics in the education field. Our main contribution is the quantitative methodological design for examining the hot topics and evolution of education research, which is highly multidisciplinary and covers a large volume of publications.

KEYWORDS:

• Education research
• topic evolution analysis
• bibliometrics
• keyword co-occurrence network

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge support from the Innovative Research Group Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71721002), Excellent Youth Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71722002), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2018M631513) and the General Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71673164). The findings and observations contained in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the supporters.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [2018M631513]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [71721002], [71722002], [71673164].