Internationalizing Engineering Education Research: Mapping Countries And Keywords To Identify New Collaborative Horizons

What are the current levels of activity and leading subject areas of engineering education research, both worldwide and in specific national and regional contexts? And to what extent are engineering education researchers collaborating across countries? Building on prior theoretical and methodological insights from social studies of science and bibliometrics, we address these research questions by analyzing more than 2,000 journal articles and conference papers published from 2005 to 2008. Our findings are organized in three main parts. First, we describe how basic criteria for empirical research were used to select more than 800 qualifying articles for further analysis. We report on the number and percent of qualifying research papers appearing in each major publication outlet, providing insights about the research orientation of these outlets and recent trends in their respective orientations. Second, information about the institutional affiliations of authors for all qualifying papers allows us to report on publication activity by country and region. Some “enabling factors” are presented to explain particularly high levels of activity in certain countries and regions. Author affiliation data is also used to highlight current collaborative patterns in engineering education research, including trends related to coauthorship and multi-national research teams. Third and finally, a systematic examination of keywords allows us to categorize and count articles in a number of major topic areas. The paper concludes with a discussion of how our findings are being used to identify opportunities and strategies for building global capacity and developing cross-national collaborations in targeted research areas.