Taking a Snapshot: Four Bibliometric Indicators to Track Engineering Education Research Evolution

In recent years, as engineering education research (EER) has evolved as an area of study, questions of its disciplinary status, global reach and diffusion of educational innovation have been raised. Bibliometric analysis, mainly employing author affiliation data and citation analysis, has been shown to be effective in gathering relevant data on these issues. In this paper, the authors broaden the scope of previous analyses by introducing reference discipline as an indicator. The study presents data on 169 articles published in seven EER journals in 2011 based on the use of four indicators: citation analysis, reference discipline, author geographical location and author disciplinary field data. In addition, demonstrating the value of this approach in establishing benchmarks for longitudinal research, the citation analysis data for the 7 journals in 2011 are compared with a similar sample from the same journals in 2009. The portrait that emerges is a rich and complex one and it shows the existence of some silos - disciplinary silos and to a lesser extent geographical silos.