Revealing the research landscape of Master's degrees via bibliometric analyses

Abstract

The evolution of a Master's programme, like many other human institutions, can be viewed as a self-organising system whose underlying structures and dynamics arise primarily from the interaction of its faculty and students. Identifying these hidden properties may not be a trivial task, due to the complex behaviour implicit in such evolution. Nonetheless, we argue that the programme's body of research production (represented mainly by dissertations) can serve this purpose. Bibliometric analyses of such data can reveal insights about production growth, collaborative networks, and visual mapping of established, niche, and emerging research topics, among other facets. Thus, we propose a bibliometric workflow aimed at discovering the production dynamics, as well as the conceptual, social and intellectual structures developed by the Master's degree, in the interest of guiding decision-makers to better assess the strengths of the programme and to prioritise strategic goals. In addition, we report two case studies to illustrate the realisation of the proposed workflow. We conclude with considerations on the possible application of the approach to other academic research units.

The role of STEM Education in improving the quality of education: a bibliometric study

“…OR "school enrollment" OR "school enrolment" OR "inclusive education" OR "educational inequality" OR "education quality" OR "educational enrolment" OR "educational enrollment" OR "adult literacy" OR "numeracy rate" OR "educational environment" OR "educational access" OR ("development aid" AND "teacher training") OR "early childhood education" OR "basic education" OR "affordable education" OR "educational financial aid" OR "school safety" OR "safety in school" OR ( "learning opportunities" AND ("gender disparities" OR empowerment)) OR ("learning opportunity" AND ("gender disparities" OR empowerment)) OR "youth empowerment" OR "women empowerment" OR "equal opportunities" OR "child labour" OR "child labor" OR "discriminatory" OR "educational inequality" OR "educational gap" OR ("poverty trap" AND "schooling") OR "special education needs" OR "inclusive education system" OR ("schooling" AND ("gender disparities" OR "ethnic disparities" OR "racial disparities")) OR "education exclusion" OR "education dropouts" OR "global citizenship" OR "sustainable development education" OR "environmental education" OR "education policy" OR "educational policies" OR "international education" OR "education reform" OR ( "educational reform" AND "developing countries") OR "educational governance" OR ("developing countries" AND "school effects" ) OR "education expenditure" OR "foreign aid" OR ("teacher training" AND "developing countries") OR "teacher attrition" ) AND NOT "health literacy") #2 TITLE-ABS-KEY ("STEM education*" OR "STEAM Education*" OR "Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics" OR "Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics" OR "integrated STEM" OR "integrated STEAM" OR "STEM element*" OR "STEM approach" OR "STEM content" OR "STEM field*" OR "STEM program*" OR "STEM professional*" OR "STEM methodology" OR "STEM initiative*" OR "STEM teacher*" OR "STEM industries" OR "STEM subject*" OR "STEM literature" OR "STEM classes" OR "STEM process" OR "STEM practice*" OR "STEM career*" OR "STEM integration" OR "STEM contexts" OR "STEM disciplines" OR "STEM learning" OR "STEM teaching") #3 #1 AND #2 #4 #3 AND EXCLUDE (PUBYEAR, 2021) * There are sixteen pre-generated queries on the UN Sustainable Development Goals 2020, on SCOPUS advanced search database that one of them is relevant to "Quality education" with these predefined search terms. According to (Chaparro & Rojas-Galeano, 2021), there are two stages of bibliometric assessment which are dynamics and structure analysis. The dynamics analysis considers the publications growth and distribution, the author's timelines, as well as the trends of the terms, keywords frequency, citation counts and distribution, and other bibliometric impact indicators, such as the h-index.…”

“…In addition, the average number of unique authors per document was 2.81, which is close to the number of co-authors per document (2.91) which indicates a few common documents. Moreover, the collaboration index that indicated the average number of authors in documents by multiple authors(Chaparro & Rojas-Galeano, 2021;Elango & Rajendran, 2012), was 3.25. The last parameter in Table2is the number of references.…”

E-Learning in Mathematics Education: a Bibliometric Analysis (2012-2022)

“…Bibliometric assessment has two strengths. These are the dynamic and structural analysis phases (Chaparro & Rojas-Galeano, 2021). In dynamic analysis, impact values such as the number of publications and citations, timeline of authors, general trends/changes of terms, keywords frequency, distribution of keywords, and h-index are examined (Jamali et al, 2022).…”

Research hotspots and development trends of model and modelling education research: Bibliometric analysis based on CiteSpace

“…In accordance with Chaparro and Rojas-Galeano [ 38 ], bibliometric assessment involves two stages: dynamics analysis and structure analysis. Dynamics analysis considers the growth and distribution of publications and authors’ timelines, while structure analysis includes co-occurrence networks, thematic maps, and collaboration and co-citation networks.…”