Authorship and Content Analysis of Engineering Education Research: A Case Study

Abstract

Abstract-In this paper, Engineering Education as a discipline has been analyzed by taking IEEE Transactions on Education (IEEE T Educ) as a case; for examining the various trends that have been emerging over time. Based on various criteria of authorship and citation, an effort is made to highlight the main contributors or top authors of this engineering education community. It was found that authorship trends have been shifting more towards collaboration. It was also found that the authorship community is growing, both in terms of publications and publishing authors. Study of citation patterns during the last decade, reveals a high citation count per article, which indicates a high readership of this journal. Later, the study of authorship and citation patterns shed light on the trend that multi-author articles are cited more often than single-author articles. This study was compared with earlier studies in the field of Engineering Education Research (EER) using keyword analysis and temporal evolution and distribution of keywords. Additionally key-phrase and topic modeling was performed to identify leading and evolving research areas within the EER., Analysis of word co-occurrence was performed to discover the main context in which the keywords have been used. Lastly, topic modeling techniques were applied for probabilistic distributions of IEEE topics and the results were in line with earlier studies.

Understanding the Bibliometric Patterns of Publications in IEEE Access

“…A good proportion of papers are authored by 6-10 authors, a trend that increases with time. This trend is consistent with studies showing a general increase in multi-authored papers [37], [38]. The proportion of papers having more than ten authors has decreased and is very low in recent years.…”

Tracing Pedagogical Progression on the Doctoral Level

“…One of the fiercest rivalries in the global higher education arena materializes in doctoral curricula, with productivity constituting the traditional -and sole -measure of both institutional and individual researcher performance [1]. As public and corporate funding is strongly dependent on performance indicators, universities have eagerly implemented interventions increasing accountability particularly through student achievement and retention [2], publication productivity, quality of researcher outputs, and ultimately expedition of doctoral degree completion [3].…”

“…These emerging global forces [4], largely triggered by funding agency interests [2], impact institutional development also in Finland, where Aalto University has begun to invest in improvement measures to support doctoral candidates in engineering in their academic pursuits. These well-intended endeavors have been insufficiently informed by research evidence, as educational development on the doctoral level has, until recently, been largely shadowed by undergraduate education [4].…”

Productive tensions? Analyzing the arguments made about the field of engineering education research

“…Many of these articles offer an empirical assessment of publications in the projected field of EER in order to develop claims about its nature and purpose. Bibliometric analyses have been prominent and continue to be significant in the field: author and citation analyses (Jesiek et al, 2011;Wankat, 2004;Williams et al, 2018;Xian & Madhavan, 2014), as well as content analyses and meta-analyses (Koro-Ljungberg & Douglas, 2008;Nawaz & Strobel, 2016). While these have been important analyses for getting an overview of the field, we are interested in work that might interrogate more deeply the claims that are being made about what constitutes acceptable research output in this field (variously defined through terms such as rigor, quality, etc.).…”