Mapping the literature structure of ‘quality in higher education’ using co-word analysis

Abstract

Quality in higher education is an attractive and important field not only for higher education institutions but also for their stakeholders. However, the research field is very complex due to the overlapping and interlinking of its topics. Over the years, an enormous amount of studies has been devoted to exploring different topics. Nevertheless, few studies focus on exploring the main topics and assessing whether these topics are interlinked. Therefore, there is merit in reducing the complexity of this field by mapping, clustering and visualising the structure of publications’ topics. The research methodology is based on implementing the co-word analysis of keywords extracted from more than two thousand academic publications seeking to reveal the prominent topics and the connections among them from a static and dynamic point of view. Mapping the literature structure of the research field reveals four key areas in the research field where each contains topics that are very likely to be interrelated to each other rather than to topics from other different areas.

Keywords:

• Quality
• higher education
• keywords analysis
• co-word analysis
• literature mapping
• literature review
• link analysis