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Strobel Et Al Interdisciplinary Engineering
Strobel Et Al Interdisciplinary Engineering
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6 authors, including:
Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:
All content following this page was uploaded by Johannes Strobel on 31 May 2016.
Johannes Strobel is Director of INSPIRE, Institute for P-12 Engineering Research and Learning, and
Assistant Professor of engineering education and learning design and technology at Purdue University.
NSF and several private foundations fund his research. His research and teaching focuses on policy
of P-12 engineering, how to support teachers and students’ academic achievements through engineering
learning, the measurement and support of change of habits of mind, particularly in regards to sustainability
and the use of cyber-infrastructure to sensitively and resourcefully provide access to and support learning
of complexity.
Ji Hyun Yu is a Ph.D candidate in learning design and technology at Purdue University. She has been
involved in several projects, including Web 2.0-supported collaborative learning, engineering-related be-
liefs (i.e. personal epistemology ontology), scientific collaboration in EER using bibliometric methods,
and K-6 teacher competency modeling using a Delphi method.
Sadia Nawaz graduated from Purdue University with master’s of science in electrical and computer en-
gineering (MSECE). Her research interests include citation analysis, social network analysis, database
systems, and embedded systems. Currently, she is working as a Data Management Consultant for the
VOSS project in Purdue University. Prior to joining Purdue, she completed her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees
in electrical engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan.
Jea Hong Choi is a doctoral candidate in the learning design and technology program at Purdue University.
Specifically, Choi is interested in online learning motivation, social presence, and social network analysis.
Page 25.864.1
American
c Society for Engineering Education, 2012
Is Engineering Education Community Becoming More Interdisciplinary?
Abstract
This study uses bibliometric methods for disciplinary diversity, co-authorship, and
research trends, to investigate the interdisciplinary changes in Engineering Education Research
during 1980-2010. For this, the authors utilized the subject categories (SC) provided by the
Thomson Scientific’s Institute for Scientific Information ISI; specifically, the prominent authors
working in EER were revealed based on their productivity (e.g. publication counts and
collaboration patterns).The study revealed that there is a variety of disciplines participated in
EER; as a result there is the trend towards multiple authorships and increasing attempts for the
transition from individual curriculum innovation research towards pure basic and translational
research that require collaboration across disciplines.
Introduction
social and cognitive psychology, sociology, education, and other STEM education disciplines) to
bring valuable research skills and perspectives5. However, like many interdisciplinary fields,
engineering education has the difficulty to identify what constitutes ‘interdisciplinary’ work due
to lack of appropriate indicators to measure the degree of knowledge integration. It is thus
worthwhile exploring current initiatives to lead the formation of interdisciplinary networks of
engineering education researchers and the changes of interdisciplinarity over time using
bibliometric indicators. To date, interdisciplinarity of engineering education research has been
conceptualized in various ways; for example, by reflecting the international perspective on the
need for interdisciplinary expertise in engineering education scholarship6 7 8 or by analyzing the
citations in publication records to examine the level of dissemination of engineering education
innovations9 10. Generally, interdisciplinarity has been explored using a variety of research
attributes, such as research formulation process, collaborations, research outcomes, and research
impact. However, the US National Academies Committee on Science, Engineering & Public
Policy (COSEPUP), Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research report, Facilitating
Interdisciplinary Research11 (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11153) suggests that
interdisciplinarity, as an epistemic category, be determined based on the content of research
outcomes that reflect knowledge integration12 13 Accordingly, numerous studies in the
bibliometric community have focused on research publications to measure intellectual diversity
encoded in publication records, by analyzing the association of the journals that they cite to
corresponding Subject Categories (SCs) provided by Thomson Scientific’s Institute for Scientific
Information (ISI) 14 15 16.
Besides these two indicators, this study also investigated journal authorship trends across
the transition from curriculum innovation to translational research, assuming that it may reflect
the changes of research collaboration patterns over the past decades, as evidence of increasing
interdisciplinarity in EER. Specifically, we attempted to apply a scholarly and systematic
educational innovation cycle of educational practice and research originally proposed by Booth,
Colomb, and Williams. Similarly, in the pulibcation of “Creating a culture for scholarly and
systematic innovation in engineering education: Ensuring u.S. Engineering has the right people
with the right talent for a global society”, Jamieson and Lohmann adapted that innovation cycle,
as shown in Figure 1 below, and argued, “[E]ngineering education innovation is about designing
effective learning environments. It requires, at the least, engineering and education expertise
working in continual cycles of educational practice and research (p.6)”.
Methods
In this study the authors used two bibliometric methods, (a) Web of Science Subject
Categories (SCs) analysis and (b) co-authorship analysis, to investigate the interdisciplinary
changes in engineering education research during 1980-2009. As in our previous study on a
keyword-based scheme to generate a dataset and define engineering education research28, we
assumed that it is important to have an inclusive approach to boundary-drawing of engineering
education research; and then we adopted a hybrid approach of inductive and deductive keyword
collection and categorization. Similar studies have previously been done where keywords are
used to define the boundary of a field; for example Grodal and Thomas (2008) defined nano-
biotechnology using the combination of keywords pertaining to nano and bio fields. That is we
conducted a series of iterations of keyword collection, refinement, and validation processes
which incorporated both the author-defined keyword-driven inductive approach from both
engineering education publications and education publications; and the deductive a prior
template of the five key topic areas of engineering education research (Steering Committee of the
National Engineering Education Research Colloquies, 2006).
Because of this explorative nature of this study, the present study focused on only a set of
keywords representing the formal and informal educational lifespan: types of schools they could
go in a life time; various grade levels they could experience; and other relevant
professional/work experience they could have in their lifelong learning. To limit the range of
data that is analyzed in the present study, the authors referred to the description of American
education system in the Digest of education statistics 2009 published by U.S. Department of
Education29. Then, we established a list of lifespan keywords related to the different junctures of
education, filtered the 142,981 publications in the entire dataset, in order to extract the
publications that include one or more of the lifespan keywords. Table 1 shows the list of the
Page 25.864.6
lifespan keywords.
Table 1
Samples of lifespan-related keywords within the engineering education research publications
pre-kindergarten 7th grade tertiary education workplace training
pre-kindergarten children 8th grade college freshman work place training
pre-kindergarten pupil 9th grade college sophomore workplace experience
Kindergarten 10th grade college junior work place experience
kindergarten children 11th grade college senior workforce development
kindergarten pupil 12th grade Freshman work force development
pre-school middle school Sophomore professional development
pre-school children middle school children Junior professional practice
pre-school pupil middle school pupil Senior corporate training
elementary education high school junior Student internship
elementary school children high school sophomore Pupil Co-Op program
elementary school pupil high school senior School Co-Op experience
1st grade secondary education vocational education P-12 education
2nd grade post-secondary education community college K-12 education
3rd grade pre-college graduate pre-college
4th grade undergraduate graduate education study abroad
5th grade college graduate school gap year
6th grade university adult education …
Thus the lifespan related dataset was extracted and then the authors analyzed the ISI
Subject Categories distribution and co-authorship within this dataset to probe the
interdisciplinary natures and changes in engineering education research.
Subject Categories
A number of bibliometric studies have used the ISI Subject Categories to examine the
nature of knowledge integration within interdisciplinary research30. Despite their well-known
limitations, the ISI Subject Categories have been considered well-matched indicators to show the
level of bodies of specialized knowledge or research practice (National Academies Facilitating
Interdisciplinary Research Committee, 2005)11. In terms of the coverage of Subject Categories
over one publication, it should be noted that the ISI Subject Categories are not mutually
exclusive; and as a result, any article can belong to one or more of these Subject Categories
simultaneously. The authors assume that this non-disjoint nature of the Subject Categories may
reflect the degree of interdisciplinarity across publications.
Co-authorship
A co-authored paper can be divided into co-authorship pairs showing collaborative links,
Page 25.864.7
which can be studied independently or used to construct social networks consisting of several
collaborative links31. In this study, the authors processed the records using the NodeXL software
to examine the degree of collaboration across different disciplines in the engineering education
research. As a result, the following indicators were calculated: node or vertex in this study
represents an author; edge exists between two authors if they are co-authors of an article; unique
edge count will represent the overall count of co-authors (irrespective of their mutual article or
publication count). The edge is represented by a straight line between two nodes or by a loop on
the node. In terms of the interdisciplinary collaboration among the author groups, the present
study operationally defined one’s discipline as his or her departmental affiliation.
As the third indicator of interdisciplinarity in EER, This study attempted to examine the
relationship between authorship trends and research typologies in the lifespan related dataset
during 1990-200 period (n=6300). First of all, 1260 records were selected, including a single-
authored paper sample as 20% of 2075 records (n=415); as well as a multi-authored paper
sample as 20% of 4225 records (n=845). Then, five coders manually reviewed these 1260 papers’
titles and abstracts in details, in order to categorize them into four research typologies, such as
descriptive research, evaluation research, basic research, and translational research on the
transition from curriculum innovation towards translational research (See Figure 2). Through a
series of qualitative analysis, data were independently coded and the coding results compared for
agreements, until inter-rater reliability reached over .80.
Results
Descriptive Statistics
Type of document The total number of papers related to lifespan keywords among
engineering education research from the ISI web database between 1980 and 2009 is 7,137.
Seventee (17) document types with the following distribution pattern were published: There were
3,558 proceeding papers comprising 49.87% of the total production, followed by paper articles
(2,765, 38.96 %), editorial materials (265, 3.72%), meeting abstracts (156, 2.19%), news items
(133, 1.87%), reviews (81, 1.14%), book reviews (61, 0.86%), letters (37, 0.52%), notes (32,
Page 25.864.8
0.45%), biographical items (16, 0.23%), reprints (8, 0.12%), software reviews (7, 0.1%),
discussion (7, 0.1%), items about an individual (6, 0.09%), correction (1, 0.02%), bibliography
(1, 0.02%), and art exhibit review (1, 0.02%). About 88.62% of papers were research articles,
indicating that engineering education has been producing research since 1980s.
168
160
150
140
131
120
106
100
80
71
60 64
40
20
0
1980-1984 1985-1989 1990-1994 1995-1999 2000-2004 2005-2009
These keywords were run on various fields (such as the author-generated keyword field
Page 25.864.9
DE, ISI’s generated keyword field ID and the title field TI) to parse out all the records of papers
containing one or more of these keywords in the aforementioned fields. The total papers were
7,137 and the total number of the ISI Subject Categories among these papers was 194. Figure 3
shows the ISI Subject Categories in six periods, 1980-1984, 1985-1989, 1990-1994, 1995-1999,
2000-2004, 2005-2009.
Broadly speaking, there is a clearly increasing trend of unique subject categories being
used in a given time span that may show the emergence of new areas in the lifespan-related
papers within engineering education research. Despite a short drop of the total Subject
Categories in 1985-1989 (n=64), the number of newly added Subject Categories during this
period was 17. Furthermore, the authors didn’t use the accumulated number of Subject
Categories, rather removed duplicates and only used uniquely emerging Subject Categories for
each time period, as also evident from Table 3.
Table 3
The above table relates each 5 year span with its previously occurring (predecessor) span
(A predecessor span does not encounter all the spans that occurred before it but considers only
the immediate span). As mentioned previously, unique SC count is the duplicate free count of the
total SC appearing in that span. A SC is considered missing if it was found in its predecessor
span but is absent from the current span. A SC is considered to be newly added if it was not
present in its predecessor span but was added in the current span. Table 3 again emphasizes: the
overall trend is that new SC are being added in each time span and hence contributing more and
more towards the interdisciplinary nature of the field of EER.
A complete list of all the Subject Categories that have been covered in the lifespan-
related engineering education research articles has been provided in Appendix A. The authors
Page 25.864.10
also attempted to observe the network diagram of all the Subject Categories and how they are
related, whether they form clusters, and which Subject Categories co-appear more frequently, as
shown in Figure 2.
In Figure 4, the nodes (represented by numbers) are all Subject Categories (the complete
list of nodes corresponding to these numbers is also provided in Appendix A). Additionally, this
figure shows the clustering of subject categories based on their co-occurrences. The highly dense
portion is an indication that the Subject Categories occur too frequently and since they lie in the
middle of the graph, it shows that they co-occur with most of the other Subject Categories. These
SC mostly include collection from education (e.g., Education, Scientific Disciplines; Education
& Educational Research;) engineering (e.g., Engineering, Electrical & Electronic; Engineering,
Chemical; Engineering, Civil) and multidisciplinary areas (e.g., Engineering, Multidisciplinary;
Multidisciplinary Sciences; Chemistry, Multidisciplinary). Also other disciplinary SC are found
to exist in this dense cluster (and they include SC like Management; Architecture; Mathematics,
Applied; Information Science & Library Science). The breadth of these SC (as also evident from
Appendix A) is an indicator of the interdiscipliarity of the field.
Page 25.864.11
The lower unconnected nodes (vertices) are indicating the Subject Categories that do not
co-occur with other Subject Categories and hence disconnected. These disconnected nodes
consist of following Subject Categories: Emergency Medicine; Demography; Agriculture, Dairy
& Animal Science; Ophthalmology; Nursing; Veterinary Sciences; Nutrition & Dietetics;
Genetics & Heredity; Gastroenterology & Hepatology; Agriculture, Multidisciplinary; Law;
Literature; Dentistry, Oral Surgery & Medicine; Plant Sciences; and Anesthesiology. The
disconnected subject categories do not co-occur with other categories making them more likely
candidates for exclusion from the dataset. To focus on which research areas (SCs) are active
within lifespan-related engineering education research, the authors selected the top ten Subject
Categories for each of the 5-year span (as mentioned in Figure 3) and these SC are presented in
Table 4. These SC were the ones in which the greatest number of lifespan-related papers were
published from within engineering education research.
Table 4
Ranking of Subject Categories
1980- 1985- 1990- 1995- 2000- 2005-
1984 1989 1994 1999 2004 2009
Subject Categories
Counts Counts Counts Counts Counts Counts
(Rank) (Rank) (Rank) (Rank) (Rank) (Rank)
Education, Scientific Disciplines 90 (1) 98 (1) 136 (3) 514 (1) 493 (1) 1213 (1)
Engineering, Multidisciplinary 75 (2) 65 (2) 104 (4) 68 (4) 288 (2) 562 (4)
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic 37 (3) 54 (3) 230 (1) 372 (2) 263 (4) 774 (3)
Education & Educational Research 18 (4) 16 (6) 145 (2) 316 (3) 267 (3) 984 (2)
Nuclear Science & Technology 15 (5) 3 (24) 12 (16) 10 (31) 7 (59) 13 (53)
Chemistry, Multidisciplinary 11 (6) 11 (7) 34 (5) 48 (6) 50 (14) 25 (35)
Engineering, Chemical 11 (7) 9 (10) 13 (16) 29 (11) 16 (43) 20 (39)
Engineering, Civil 11 (8) 5 (17) 24 (7) 34 (9) 49 (15) 61 (15)
Engineering, Mechanical 10 (9) 31 (4) 6 (37) 38 (8) 56 (12) 132 (7)
Multidisciplinary Sciences 10 (9) 11 (7) 18 (12) 10 (31) 24 (28) _
Management 9 (11) 3 (24) 21 (8) 22 (14) 49 (15) 102 (10)
Computer Science, Theory & Methods 2 (29) 20 (5) 27 (6) 15 (22) 28 (22) 183 (6)
Architecture 8 (12) 9 (10) 11 (18) 10 (31) 15 (46) 13 (53)
Telecommunications 1 (43) _ 21 (8) 11 (27) 28 (22) 43 (20)
Information Science & Library Science 1 (43) 11 (7) 18 (10) 14 (23) 34 (19) 63 (14)
Mathematics, Applied _ _ 18 (10) 4 (65) 5 (73) 34 (29)
Computer Science, Interdisciplinary
Applications 7 (14) 7 (15) 15 (14) 57 (5) 119 (5) 195 (5)
Computer Science, Software Engineering 5 (18) 8 (13) 8 (24) 44 (7) 72 (8) 131 (8)
Computer Science, Information Systems 1 (43) 5 (18) 13 (15) 31 (10) 89 (7) 129 (9)
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence _ 1 (42) 3 (54) 16 (20) 91 (6) 97 (11)
Page 25.864.12
Based on the Table 4, the authors computed a correlation triangle that shows the
relationship among the collections of uniquely added Subject Categories over time (Table 5).
This table aims at finding the associating of the top SC in a given 5-year span with each of its
predecessor span (unlike table – 3 in which all SC were considered and not just the top SC. Also,
in table – 3 the comparison was made with only the immediate predecessor and not all the
predecessors). It is observed that despite the removal of SC duplicates, the correlations are
relatively high from 0.5 – 0.8. Therefore, there is a notable distribution of the Subject Categories
that shows the increase of disciplinary diversity within lifespan-related engineering education
research.
Table 5
Correlation Co-efficient among time periods
1980-1984 1985-1989 1990-1994 1995-1999 2000-2004 2005-2009
1980-1984 - 0.8 0.6 0.7 0.4 0.5
1985-1989 - - 0.7 0.6 0.4 0.6
1990-1994 - - - 0.6 0.4 0.6
1995-1999 - - - - 0.7 0.8
2000-2004 - - - - - 0.7
2005-2009 - - - - - -
Page 25.864.13
Additionally, the authors analyzed the percentage of Subject Categories representing over
the lifespan-related engineering education research publications during 1980-2009. As shown in
Table 6, Education, Scientific Disciplines dominates about 35.6% over all lifespan-related
publications, followed by Engineering, Multidisciplinary (16.3%); Engineering, Electrical &
Electronic (24.3%); and Education & Educational Research (24.5%).
Table 6
Percentage of the Subject Categories during 1980-2009
Subject Categories %
Education, Scientific Disciplines 35.7
Education & Educational Research 24.5
60.2
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic 24.3
Engineering, Multidisciplinary 16.3
Engineering, Mechanical 3.9
Engineering, Civil 2.6
Engineering, Biomedical 2.1
Engineering, Chemical 1.4
50.6
Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications 5.7
Computer Science, Theory & Methods 3.9
Computer Science, Software Engineering 3.8
Computer Science, Information Systems 3.8
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence 3.0
20.2
Management 2.9
Chemistry, Multidisciplinary 2.6
Automation & Control Systems 2.1
Information Science & Library Science 2.0
Telecommunications 1.5
Multidisciplinary Sciences 1.1
Architecture 1.0
Nuclear Science & Technology 0.9
Mathematics, Applied 0.9
15.0
Some studies show concerns regarding the correctness of the ISI SC classification.
Science overlay maps are robust to these classification issues and hence they are presented in this
study. They are also a better tool in providing a complete illustration of SC distribution.
In this study the science overlay maps have been presented using the 19 factor analysis of
Page 25.864.14
the 224 ISI subject categories (i.e., the 224 SC have been replaced by 19 macro disciplines).
Figure 5. Science overlay map for the subject categories of EER related lifespan articles. (This
figure has been made using the methods provided by Ismael Rafols, Alan L. Porter, and Loet
Leydesdorff, “Science overlay maps: a new tool for research policy and library management,” Journal of
the American Society for Information Science & Technology 61(9) (2010) 1871-1887 available at:
http://www.leydesdorff.net/overlaytoolkit/)
The right hand side of the picture shows more of the technical and engineering related
macro disciplines, which includes: Computer Science, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering,
Physics, Material Sciences, Environmental Sciences and technology, Chemistry, Agricultural
Sciences, Ecological Sciences and Geosciences. The left hand side is showing those macro
disciplines related to clinical and health sciences such as: Psychological Sciences, Clinical
Medicine, Infectious Diseases, Health and Social Issues, Clinical Psychology. Biomedical
Science is serving more as a bridge between the technical and health related macro disciplines.
Page 25.864.15
Social Studies, Economics, Geography, Business and Management related SCs have been
displayed on top of the picture. Clearly, the biggest contribution is that from the technical fields
followed by Business and Management and then comes Biomedical Sciences. The breadth of
these SCs is an indication of the highly diverse and interdisciplinary nature of the field of EER.
Overall statistics of authorship A total of 7,137 lifespan articles were extracted from the
original database, among which 62.52% were the collaborative products between two or more
authors. 12,914 unique authors were identified and the overall count of co-authors was 1,925.
The maximum number of co-authors in any article shows that the largest group of collaborators
consisted of 29 authors. Table 7 is the summary of authorship.
Table 7
Summary of Authorship among lifespan-related engineering education research publications
Descriptive statistics Count
No. of articles 7,137
Count of single author articles 2,675
Count of unique authors 12,914
Count of unique edges 1,925
Maximum number of co-authors in any article 29
Count of publications by Anonymous authors 209
Subject Category (SC) relation with authorship Next, an attempt is made to visualize the
authorship and collaboration trends for each of the subject categories. A given SC with a higher
average author count per publication implies potential for more collaboration and these high
collaboration patterns could lead to interdisciplinarity. The authorship and collaboration trends
for the top ten Subject Categories (of the previously provided table – 4) have been presented in
Table 8.
Results indicate that Mathematics, Applied has contributed more towards the
interdisciplinary nature of the lifespan articles belonging to EER. While highest count of
publications belong to Education, Scientific Disciplines and Education & Educational Research
still other SCs have higher collaboration trends such as Engineering, Biomedical ; Computer
Science, Theory and Methods ; Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence etc.
Page 25.864.16
Table 8
Authorship – Collaboration trends for top subject categories
Average number of
Publication Author
Subject Category authors per
Count Count
publication
Mathematics, Applied 61 198 3.25
Engineering, Biomedical 149 430 2.89
Computer Science, Theory & Methods 279 735 2.64
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence 211 554 2.63
Education & Educational Research 1780 4571 2.57
Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications 416 1068 2.57
Education, Scientific Disciplines 2646 6728 2.55
Computer Science, Software Engineering 273 693 2.54
Automation & Control Systems 149 376 2.53
Computer Science, Information Systems 271 679 2.51
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic 1757 4381 2.5
Engineering, Multidisciplinary 1246 3046 2.45
Telecommunications 105 256 2.44
Management 260 590 2.27
Nuclear Science & Technology 60 131 2.19
Engineering, Mechanical 276 572 2.08
Information Science & Library Science 146 295 2.03
Architecture 133 265 2
Multidisciplinary Sciences 110 212 1.93
Engineering, Civil 187 354 1.9
Chemistry, Multidisciplinary 182 321 1.77
Engineering, Chemical 101 172 1.71
Collaboration patterns Table 10 indicates that there were 17 authors who collaborated
with 30 or more different authors. These authors would bring the most diverse collaborative
group in the engineering education research community in terms of co-authorship. The most
prominent collaborators were Turns, J, Miller, RL and Chen, H with 48, 45 and 44 collaborators
respectively. 59% of the tops authors bringing the most diverse group of coauthors are from the
engineering-related disciplines; 12% of them are from educational disciplines; and 29% of them
are from the discipline of engineering education.
Page 25.864.18
Table 10
Top authors bringing the most diverse group of co-authors
Author names Discipline Count of collaborators
Turns, J Human Centered Design and Engineering 48
Miller, RL Chemical Engineering 45
Chen, H Biomedical Engineering 44
Sheppard, SD Mechanical Engineering 40
Kilgore, D Engineering Learning and Teaching 35
Yasuhara, K Engineering Learning and Teaching 34
Besterfield-Sacre, M Industrial Engineering 33
Stevens, R Education 33
Williams, D Civil Engineering 32
Lichtenstein, G Mechanical Engineering 32
Amos, DM Engineering 31
Streveler, R Engineering Education 30
Smith, K Engineering/Engineering Education 30
Fleming, L Civil Engineering 30
Atman, CJ Engineering Learning and Teaching 30
Matusovich, H Engineering Education 30
Morozov, A Educational Psychology 30
The research team also identified the most prominent pairs of authors who contributed
together to the EER community. Table 11 displays the top authors who had co-authored in 8 or
more articles. Burns, GR and Chisholm, CU were found out to be the most frequent collaborative
pair with the highest co-authorship article count of 12. One third of the top collaborating author
groups are interdisciplinary.
Table 11
Top Collaborating Author Groups
1st author Discipline 2nd Discipline 3rd Discipline 4th Discipline Co-
author author author authored
papers
Burns, GR Engineering Chishol Engineering 12
m, CU
Atman, CJ Industrial Turns, J Engineering 11
Engineering Learning and
Teaching
Page 25.864.19
To compare the trends of co-authored articles versus those of single author articles, a
comparison is made between the graphs of the two as shown in Figure 4 (this graph was obtained
by using the NodeXL software).
In Figure 6, the circles represent a self-loop or a single author article. The thicker this
circle becomes the higher is the count of articles by that represented author. The straight line
represents an edge between two authors i.e., shows that two nodes (a node in this case represents
an author) have an existing collaboration. To further explain, the thicker the edge becomes the
higher is the count of joint articles by these two represented authors. The black dots are the
nodes representing the authors. It is observed that the authors of single author articles did not
have a common trend of collaboration. Also, the count of authors having single author articles is
small when compared with the authors of multi-author articles. It is also observed that the single
author graph is sparse whereas the multi-author graph is dense. So it can be suggested that more
authors are collaborating. It is quite possible that when such high collaboration is made the
authors may come from different disciplines and different institutions and hence contribute to the
interdisciplinarity of the field.
To capture journal authorship trends across research typologies in EER, some statistical
tests were performed. First of all, a chi-square test indicated that there was a significant
relationship between the authorship type (single-authored/multiple-authored) and the four
research types (descriptive research, evaluation research, basic research, and translational
research) (χ2(1) = 7.902, p = .048). It also shows that both single-authored and multiple-authored
articles have similar pattern of publish to each research type, as shown in Figure 7.
Table. 12.
Research Type
1a 1b 2a 2b
descriptive evaluation basic translational
research research research research Total
a. 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 45.04.
Symmetric Measures
Both single-authored and multiple-authored articles were significantly more likely to fall
into the research type of “Descriptive Research (1a)”; in addition, more multiple-authored
Page 25.864.22
articles were more likely to fall into the research type of “Basic Research (2a)”. The effect size
was .093.
A chi-square test was performed to see the proportions of research typologies over time.
To this end, the 1990-2010 year range was broken into five years: 1990-1995, 1996-2000, 2001-
2005, and 2006-2010. Since the articles before 1990s did not have the abstracts, they were not
selected for data analysis.
Table. 13.
1a 1b 2a 2b
descriptive evaluation basic translational
research research research research Total
Chi-Square Tests
a. 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 11.63.
Page 25.864.23
A chi-square test indicates there was a significant difference in the proportion of
authorship types over time (χ2(1) = 8.007, p = .046). Overall, there were significantly more
multi-authored articles as compared to single-authored articles throughout 1990 to 2010. The
effect size was .093.
Table 14.
Chi-square test of year range vs. Author types
Authorship Type
Chi-Square Tests
a. 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 16.69.
Page 25.864.24
Symmetric Measures
Figure 8 confirms the result that the number of authors has been increased throughout
1990-2010. Specifically, it shows that there is a dramatic increase of multiple-authored papers,
compared to single-authored papers.
A spearman's rank order correlation shows that there was a positive correlation between
the year and research type, which was statistically significant (rs= .085, p = .010). This means,
there is a transition from curriculum innovation research (e.g. descriptive research and evaluation
research) towards translational research (e.g. basic research and translational research) over time.
Page 25.864.25
Table 15.
Spearman’s Rank Order on year and research type
Correlations
N 921 921
N 921 921
Overall, there is an obvious trend towards multiple authorships and increasing attempts
for translational research in EER. Particularly, there is a growing interest in pure basic research
among multiple-authored papers.
Conclusion
This article relies on the keyword based definition of the field of EER. The keyword
based approach was adopted due to the fact that the field of EER is not only emerging (due to
which its publishing venues are not that well established) but also interdisciplinary in nature (due
to which a large collection of EER related articles can be found in a vast variety of non-EER
venues). Similar keyword based studies for defining the boundary of interdisciplinary fields have
already been conducted by researchers. The complete justification and methodology for this
approach has already been provided by the authors in an early article.
The analysis suggests that engineering education research exhibits an increasingly high
degree of disciplinary diversity as evident from the overall increasing trend of SC inclusion in
Page 25.864.26
EER related articles (shown in figure 1 and table 3). Not surprisingly, lifespan-related
engineering education publications are centered on education (Scientific Disciplines, Educational
Research) and engineering (Electrical & Electronic, Multidisciplinary, Chemical, Civil,
Mechanical, and Biomedical) as evident from the network diagram of figure 2. However,
engineering education research significantly involves many other fields, computer science,
business, management, library and information science, among others (see table 4). An alternate
way of measuring the increasing interdisciplinary nature of the field of EER is via correlation
coefficients. From table 5 it is seen that the coefficient goes as high as 0.8 and hence in any
given time span nearly 20% of the SC are new when compared with all previous time spans. The
presence of high count of ISI WoS SC is another indication of the interdisciplinary nature of
EER (as presented in appendix A). Since some studies raised questions regarding the correctness
of the classification of the ISI SC so the authors adopted a more robust approach i.e., by using
science overlay maps which is again showing the depth and breadth of the field of EER.
More importantly, the co-authorship analysis in this study gives an overview of the major
features of EER community. The majority of the most prominent authors with single-authored
articles had engineering-related departmental affiliation, however, the reality check indicates
basically none of these single authors are well known engineering education researchers. The
implication might be the prominent single authors are more of engineering education
practitioners, for example, they might have individually developed a new course or employed a
new tool in teaching. In contrast, the top collaborating authors with most co-authored articles are
all very well-known engineering education researchers. Such reality check might imply that
engineering education research is naturally multi-disciplinary or at least multi authored. The top
collaborating author groups demonstrate a collaborative trend within the engineering discipline,
many among whom brought together the expertise from a variety of engineering divisions.
Similar to the analysis on subject categories mentioned above, the co-authorship analysis verifies
that engineering education research has drawn the interest of researchers from diverse disciplines,
such as computer science, communication and anthropology.
This study also captured the relationship between journal authorship trends and research
typologies over time. The issue of an increasing number of authors per article is not limited to
EER; however, we found that there is an obvious trend towards multiple authorships along with
increasing pedagogical attempts for pure basic research (e.g. theory development for advanced
Page 25.864.27
understanding of engineering education phenomena) and translational research (e.g. strategic and
scholarly efforts for creation and dissemination of proven issues, methods, policies, etc.). It
means that there is a growing nature of interdisciplinary collaboration between practitioners and
researchers from various fields, in order to advance the frontiers of knowledge and practice in
EER.
In sum, the present findings suggest that attention needs to be paid to facilitating the
diffusion and absorption of research across disciplines. That is, our findings emphasize the
importance of supporting researchers’ capability to integrate knowledge from a wide range of
diverse fields in different ways. However, some questions about the interdisciplinarity in
engineering education research remain. Such as: more elaborated picture of network diagram
showing the growth or co-occurrence of Subject Categories together to investigate the emergence
of engineering education research with other areas; funding resources would have also helped in
answering the questions about interdisciplinarity. Departmental affiliation data is not available
from ISI Web of Science, but if it were there then the authors with multiple affiliations could
have been a source to answer the questions of interdisciplinarity (This information is however,
available in Compendex and the authors aim to extract it in upcoming publication). Therefore,
for better investigation, we suggest that infometrics tools and methods using leading databases
need to be introduced to the community of engineering education research; and researchers need
to enhance infometric capabilities that allow them to generate ‘big picture’ landscape in which to
position their own research.
Acknowledgement
This work is supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) funding under the grant
number 0943198. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this
material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National
Science Foundation.
Page 25.864.28
Appendix A.
Subject Categories emerged from 7,137 lifespan-related engineering education research articles
Page 25.864.31
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