Download Research Report: E-Learning Research Report 2017 Analysis of the main topics in research indexed articles

E-Learning Research Report 2017 Analysis of the main topics in research indexed articles

Executive summary

What do the articles on e-learning published in academic journals during 2017 talk about? To answer this question we analysed all the impact publications made during this period, with the aim of drawing a map that is useful for seeing where research efforts have been focused in recent years and what topics feature in indexed scientific publications.

The report has analyzed 855 articles obtained from the two main databases for scientific articles, Scopus and Web of Science1.

All the results are summarised graphically below. Figure 1 shows the 20 most frequently featured topics according to the analysis of the articles, that is, the main topics covered in the publications analysed. Figure 2 shows these topics grouped in categories to give a clearer perspective. Articles were also classified in accordance with the research methodology used (Figure 3), the stage of education they focus on (Figure 4) and type of access to the publication, that is whether they are open access or not (Figure 5).

There is a comparison of the data obtained in this report with the data corresponding to 2016 (eLearn Center [eLC], 2017) (Figure 6). The report also compares the research topics from 2017 with the selected trend reports for the 2012–2017 period, Horizon Reports and Innovating Pedagogy (Adams Becker et al., 2017; Ferguson et al., 2017; Freeman, Adams Becker, Cummins, Davis & Giesinger, 2017; Sharples et al., 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016) as displayed in Figure 8.