Charting the terrain of global research on graduate education: a bibliometric approach

ABSTRACT

The paper provides an overview of the global research on graduate education. The study applied a combination of a bibliometric and social network analysis methods to bibliographic data from Thompson Reuters’ Web of Science. More specifically, a keyword search approach was used to retrieve 2,454 articles on graduate education from 1996 until 2020. The set was processed with the VantagePoint software. The paper reports the findings in the form of lists of top scholars, research centres, and countries contributing to research on graduate education. The findings include similar lists of the key funding agencies, contributing disciplines and publication venues, as well as maps representing collaborative activity in the field between institutions, and countries. Finally, the frequency of utilisation of groups of author-supplied keywords is analysed to determine the basic thematic structure of the research on the topic. The originality of the paper consists in the fact that it represents the first attempt to map the landscape of research on graduate education using bibliographic data. It can be used to supplement the results of literature reviews on the topic, which apply a more in-depth content analysis-based approaches to a limited number of papers to determine the thematic structure of the field.

KEYWORDS:

• Social network analysis
• bibliometric analysis
• graduate education
• postbaccalaureate education
• research mapping
• literature review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aliya Kuzhabekova

Aliya Kuzhabekova – Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Education, Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. Aliya has a Ph.D. degree from University of Minnesota in Higher Education Policy and Administration. Her research interests focus on three areas: international higher education, gender in higher education, and research capacity development in higher education, including professional socialisation of junior scholars. Aliya uses a variety of methodological approaches in her work, including bibliometric and scientometric methods.