Fifteen Years of Recommender Systems Research in Higher Education: Current Trends and Future Direction

Figures & data

Figure 1. PRISMA flowchart (adapted from (Page et al. 2021).

Table 1. Document types of articles analyzed.

Document Types	Count	% of 272
Conference Paper	204	75
Article	59	21.7
Book Chapter	7	2.5
Review	1	0.4
Data Paper	1	0.4

Figure 2. Publication trends of the 272 articles.

Table 2. Top 10 most cited articles.

No	Article title	Year	Authors	Citations
1	Collaborative filtering adapted to recommender systems of e-learning	2009	Bobadilla J., Serradilla F., Hernando A.	209
2	Recommender system for predicting student performance	2010	Thai-Nghe N., Drumond L., Krohn-Grimberghe A., Schmidt-Thieme L.	178
3	An architecture for making recommendations to courseware authors using association rule mining and collaborative filtering	2009	García E., Romero C., Ventura S., Castro C.D.	119
4	Predicting student performance using personalized analytics	2016	Elbadrawy A., Polyzou A., Ren Z., Sweeney M., Karypis G., Rangwala H.	110
5	A recommender agent based on learning styles for better virtual collaborative learning experiences	2015	Dascalu M.-I., Bodea C.-N., Moldoveanu A., Mohora A., Lytras M., De Pablos P.O.	79
6	PCRS: Personalized course recommender system based on a hybrid approach	2018	Gulzar Z., Leema A.A., Deepak G.	68
7	Recommender system and Web 2.0 tools to enhance a blended learning model	2016	Hoic-Bozic N., Holenko Dlab M., Mornar V.	60
8	Domain-aware grade prediction and top-n course recommendation	2016	Elbadrawy A., Karypis G.	59
9	Next-term student grade prediction	2015	Sweeney M., Lester J., Rangwala H.	59
10	Collaborative filtering adapted to recommender systems of e-learning	2009	Zhang H., Huang T., Lv Z., Liu S.Y., Zhou Z.	52

Table 3. Top 10 most productive countries.

	Country	Count	% of 272
1	China	36	13.24
2	Spain	30	11.03
3	United States	29	10.66
4	Taiwan	18	6.62
5	India	18	6.62
6	Brazil	12	4.41
7	Colombia	11	4.04
8	Germany	10	3.68
9	Greece	10	3.68
10	Japan	10	3.68

Figure 3. Collaboration among countries.

Table 4. Relative growth rate and doubling time of publications.

Year	Articles	Cumulative Articles	logeW1	logeW2	RGR	Mean RGR	DT	Mean DT
2007	2	2	0	0.69	0	0.59	0	2.21
2008	13	15	0.69	2.71	2.02		0.34
2009	14	29	2.71	3.37	0.66		1.05
2010	5	34	3.37	3.53	0.16		4.33
2011	5	39	3.53	3.66	0.13		5.33
2012	12	51	3.66	3.93	0.27	0.28	2.57	2.76
2013	9	60	3.93	4.09	0.16		4.33
2014	15	75	4.09	4.32	0.23		3.01
2015	30	105	4.32	4.65	0.33		2.10
2016	49	154	4.65	5.04	0.39		1.78
2017	77	231	5.04	5.44	0.40	0.11	1.73	15.82
2018	12	243	5.44	5.49	0.05		13.86
2019	10	253	5.49	5.53	0.04		17.33
2020	4	257	5.53	5.55	0.02		34.65
2021	15	272	5.55	5.61	0.06		11.55

Table 5. Summary of the themes covered in the articles.

Theme	Articles covering the theme	Percentage of 272
Academic advising	2	0.74
Assessments	15	5.51
Career choice	11	4.04
Classroom activities	42	15.44
Course selection	26	9.56
Curriculum development	5	1.84
Distance education	2	0.74
E-learning/online learning	70	25.74
Library	6	2.21
MOOCs	16	5.88
Performance prediction	19	6.99
Personal learning	21	7.72
Reinforcement learning	6	2.21
Research	12	4.41
Tutoring	12	4.41
University choice	7	2.57

Figure 4. Network visualization co-occurrence map of high-frequency terms.

Figure 5. Keyword density map of high-frequency terms in titles and abstracts.

Page, M. J., J. E. McKenzie, P. M. Bossuyt, I. Boutron, T. C. Hoffmann, C. D. Mulrow, L. Shamseer, J. M. Tetzlaff, and D. Moher. 2021. Updating guidance for reporting systematic reviews: Development of the PRISMA 2020 statement. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 134:103–12. doi:10.1016/j.jclinepi.2021.02.003.

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