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

Abstract

In this paper, Engineering Education as a discipline has been analyzed by taking IEEE Transactions on Education (IEEE T Educ) as a case; to examine 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.