Educational Technology: A Bibliometric Approach

Abstract

Educational technology (EdTech) possesses comprehensive content and an accumulation of topics requiring extensive analyses for monitoring its development over time. Conducting comprehensive analyses facilitates acquiring a plural perspective instead of subjective experiences and facilitates focusing on the places where deficiencies occur in the field. This research aims to determine general EdTech research trends and to monitor its developments over time and investigates EdTech research from aspects such as year, publication type, country, journal, institution, author, scientific field, keywords, inter-country relationships, citations, and interactions using the bibliometric method. The study analyzes 135,835 EdTech publications published between 1950-2021 in 156 journals located in the EdTech Journals 2021 list and Scopus database and presents the findings under four headings: numerical development of EdTech research by year, content changes, relationships among the research, and research impact. The number of publications on EdTech research increased post-2000, with most being performed in the fields of social sciences and computer sciences, a large portion are composed of articles, and USA is prominent in the country rankings and coauthor analyses. When examining the common word analyses, the topics of interactive learning environments, learning-teaching strategies, pedagogical issues, virtual reality, and distance learning are prominent. The most-cited journals in EdTech research are Computers and Human Behavior, Computers and Education, and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. This study evaluates EdTech research’s numerical, contextual, and impact trends and is thought to contribute to the framework formed for future EdTech research.