The evaluation of the educational research: A scientometric approach

Abstract

The scientometric analysis of the research has become one of the most used methods to assess the research performance of the individual researchers, departments, faculties, universities, countries, and journals in recent years. However, there has not been an extensive scientometric evaluation of the global research on the education to examine the development of the research in this area. The purpose of this study was to carry out a scientometric evaluation of the global research performed by the higher education institutions on the education using the Social Sciences Citation Index database (SSCI) for the period from 1980 to 2011. There were 179,832 studies in total for the whole period and 128,929 of them were articles, reviews, and proceedings papers. "Matson JL" was the most prolific author with 172 papers and the USA was the most prolific country with 79,566 papers comprising 61.7% of the papers produced globally. 97.1% of the papers were articles and 97.3% of them were written in English. "University of Wisconsin" was the most prolific higher education institution with 2,388 papers leading the top 19 US institutions. The number of papers published varied from 3,561 papers in 1980 to 7,945 papers in 2010 suggesting a gradual increase in the number of publications over time rather than an exponential growth as in biofuels and nanotechnology. "Phi Delta Kappan" was the most productive journal publishing 2,511 papers during the last three decades. A paper related to the acquisition of the literacy was the most cited paper with 1,285 citations [1]. The scientometric analysis has a great potential to gain valuable insights into the evolution of the global research on the education, complementing the scientometric studies in the other fields such as renewable energies as well as students with disabilities providing a unique insight on the incentive structures for all the key stakeholders in the field. It was concluded in this context that the incentive structures may have not been well designed to produce superior research performance in educational research as in hard sciences such as Engineering and Health Sciences especially in the design of the rules for the academic appointments and promotions in universities.