educational research

In 1999 and 2011, the revista española de pedagogía published two similar studies reviewing the Spanish production in the field of education indexed in the Social Sciences Education Index (SSCI) database. The first study covered the period 1988-1997 and the second 1998-2009. Once enough time had passed, a quasi-replica study of the previous ones was undertaken for the period 2010-2020.

Objectives: To carry out a scientometric review of Spanish production in educational research indexed in the SSCI database of the Web of Science (WoS) in the period from 2010 to 2020. The intention is to inform the Spanish educational community of its research achievements with visibility and international impact and to draw supported scientometric conclusions about Spanish educational research.

Method: A descriptive-quantitative (scientometric) design has been used on an operating sample of 7016 documents (articles and reviews) recovered after an advanced search in the SSCI database by deliberate or purposive sampling. This study may also be characterized as secondary, since documents are used which have already been published, and revisional as regards research production.

Results: Results related to productivity and citation are provided. The diachronic production shows an increasing trend fitted to a pol nomial function. English (68.5%) and Spanish (30.3%) are the main languages of expression of such production. The most common subject areas of the Web of Science with educational areas are linguistics, and also Rehabilitation and Developmental Psychology. The institutional production is mostly of university origin, with the top ten universities listed in the following order: Barcelona, Autónoma Barcelona, Valencia, Granada, País Vasco, Sevilla, Autónoma Madrid, Nacional a Distancia, Complutense and Oviedo. International collaboration is mainly established with the following countries: USA (5.01%), England (3.9%), Chile (2.32%), Portugal (2.02 %) and the Netherlands (1.56%).

The citation results give a Hirsch h index of 89, with an increasing diachronic trend fitted to both a polynomial and an exponential model. Documents were also recovered that are citation classics, with more than 200 citations; the journal Computers & Education being the body where the most quoted Spanish educational research is published. The most active research fronts are inferred from the citation classics and by means of a word cloud of terms included in the titles; specifically: General Education, Educational Computing and Educational Evaluation.

Discussion: The results obtained and their adaptation to general laws of Scientometrics bear witness to the fertility of Spanish educational research and its adjustment to patterns typical of science. Taking into consideration two studies prior to this one, and after successive comparisons, Spanish achievements are considered to be optimistic given their abundance, impact and international visibility.

Conclusion: The way in which Spanish educational research, from very limited initial stages, has followed a complex path of improvement to achieve scientometric patterns which are comparable to those of other scientific disciplines is confirmed.

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Please, cite this article as follows: Fernández-Cano, A., & Fernández-Guerrero, A. (2022). Producción educativa española en el Social Sciences Citation Index (2010-2020). III | Spanish educational production in the Social Sciences Citation Index (2010-2020). III. Revista Española de Pedagogía, 80 (282), 347-370. https://doi.org/10.22550/REP80-2-2022-08

Technological and methodological advances enable new substantive research questions to be posed, and new study designs to be implemented, in educational research. In this paper I review emerging methods relevant for capturing learning and teaching processes over time —the sequences of learning events— which take place in multiple contexts.

To do so, the concepts of nomothetic and ideographic research are traced through the use of Cattell’s (1952) cube, posing persons, variables and time as the three key dimensions for determining study-designs. For educational research, a fourth dimension —context— is important to consider given the nested structures (e.g. student-teacher dyads, peerrelations, student-groups, classrooms, teachers, and schools) learning and teaching occurs in. Several developments of quantitative methods enable researchers to a) establish quality of measurement (e.g. factor analysis, item response models), b) across sequences of time-points (e.g. autoregressive models), c) in complex multilevel structures (e.g. multilevel models, random effects models), also using estimators which are robust for small-n studies (e.g. Bayesian models). Educational researchers are encouraged to design studies fitting multilevel models for hierarchically and cross-classified data, and to think in terms of intraindividual learning processes.

 

Cite this article as: Malmberg, L. (2018). Métodos cuantitativos para el registro de procesos y contextos en la investigación educativa | Quantitative Methods for Capturing Processes and Contexts in Educational Research. Revista Española de Pedagogía, 76 (271), 449-462. doi: https://doi.org/10.22550/REP76-3-2018-03