Networking for Educational Innovations: A Bibliometric Survey of International Publication Patterns

The emergence of networking has been viewed as a critical educational innovation. To highlight some innovations in educational networking (EN) research, this paper provides a bibliometric overview of international EN research from 2000 to 2018. Based on a keyword search, a total of 1005 journal articles with 13,803 citations were obtained. Through careful bibliometric analyses, three main results were concluded. (1) The growth of EN articles and authors was up by 1.5 times from the first decade (2000–2009) to the current one (2010–2018). (2) The most influential journals (over 300 citations) were identified. The research scope covers education technology, higher education, education policy, and even AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) education. (3) Based on some popular bibliometric indicators, the changes of research trends can be seen from the comparison of the main streams, which are identified from the most influential articles. Classification of the main research streams was presented, providing a typological understanding of the EN literature. In the first decade of research, the two articles which ranked first in terms of overall citations and average citations are Horvat et al. (2003) (232 times) and Coburn and Russell (2008) (17.6 times), respectively. In the last decade, the article by Roblyer et al. (2010) received both the highest number of citations (407) and average citations (45.2). Finally, the main ideas of highly-cited articles were categorized into three research streams. While the EN research of the earlier decade focused on interpersonal relationships, that of the recent decade emphasized on some innovative networking approaches, such as social media for learning, and network-based methodologies. Further discussions are provided.