Status and trends of socioscientific issues in educational literature: insights and extensions from a co-word analysis

ABSTRACT

The current study identified recent trends in socioscientific issues (SSIs) in the field of education. Through descriptive analysis and co-word analysis, selected articles published in journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index and Scopus from 2000 to 2021 were screened. A total of 334 papers were retrieved as research target samples from the Web of Science and Scopus databases after many rounds of searching and filtering. An analysis revealed an overall growing trend of SSI-related publications in the field of education. High-impact journals that published SSI-related research and highly cited articles were also identified. A series of co-word analyses were then conducted to determine co-occurring relationships among the keywords of the sample papers. This study extracted 39 author-defined keywords shared by at least three studies in the target samples. The analytic results indicated that ‘argumentation,’ ‘decision-making,’ ‘scientific literacy,’ and ‘knowledge’ were frequently used along with SSI as keywords. The co-word networks of the whole corpus of keywords and selected keywords were visualised to refine the common understanding of the educators and obtain the SSI research foci. This paper also offers future research directions.

KEYWORDS:

• Socioscientific issues
• research trends
• systematic review
• co-word analysis
• cognitive process
• learning outcome

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited from the comments and suggestions from the editor and two anonymous reviewers. The authors are also grateful to Professor Shiang-Yao Liu for her expert opinions on the categorization of keywords.

Disclosure statement

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

Ethics statement

This study involves neither human participants’ data nor relevant biological material. Ethics approval and informed consent are hence not applicable.

Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science and Technology Council of Taiwan [grant numbers MOST 110-2511-H-003-025-MY3 and NSTC 111-2410-H-005-056]. This work was financially supported by the Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan. This work was also financially supported by the ‘Innovation and Development Center of Sustainable Agriculture’ from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the MOE in Taiwan.