Highly cited educational technology journal articles: a descriptive and critical analysis

ABSTRACT

Citations are valuable capital in the academy as the number of citations is the most frequently used indicator in evaluating the quality of papers, journals, researchers, and universities. Thus, the characteristics of highly cited articles (HCA) have become a common research topic but the approach has been mainly descriptive with no profound critical reflection of what kind of research is cited, where the research is from, where the research is published, and what do these things mean for edtech research. This paper contributes to this need by providing a descriptive and critical analysis of 200 highly cited articles from 10 edtech journals. To summarize the key findings, a ‘typical’ edtech HCA is a Western-based review article or quantitative research paper reporting positive findings from higher education, published in a high-impact factor general edtech journal by a major publisher.

KEYWORDS:

• Citation
• educational technology
• qualitative
• quantitative
• review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To be precise, many of these studies have analysed a larger sample of articles but HCA sub-sample has been small.

2 ¹GS provides field-specific lists of journals with biggest h5-indexes. The list of edtech journals can be found here: https://bit.ly/3oyYd7t. Because the h5-index is updated annually, a screenshot of the 2020 list can be found here: https://bit.ly/3KBctpu.

3 https://bit.ly/3A7dU92.

4 We did not provide the reference here as the content of the extract (as an example of a more general phenomenon) is more important than naming the exact source.

5 To be precise, CALL was ranked 11th but we decided to neglect the 7th highest ranked journal International Journal of Instruction, which based on a screening of 20 most cited articles and the most recent issues is not an edtech journal and, thus, was (for a reason unknown) placed in a wrong subsection of educational research. Only 5 of the 20 most cited articles in IJI were about edtech. Likewise, only one third (21/63) of articles of the most recent issue (July 2022) were edtech-themed.