Bibliometric insights into data mining in education research: A decade in review

Abstract

This bibliometric study on data mining in education synonymous with big educational data utilizes VOSviewer and Harzing’s Publish and Perish to analyze the metadata of 1,439 journal articles found in Scopus from 2010 to 2022. As bibliometric analyses in this field are lacking, this study aims to provide a comprehensive outlook on the current developments and impact of research in this field. This study employs descriptive and trends analysis, co-authorship analysis, co-citation analysis, co-occurrences of keywords, terms map analysis, and analysis of the impact and performance of publications. It also partially replicates a similar study conducted by Wang et al. (2022), who used the Web of Science (WoS) database. The study is reported in an article entitled ‘Big data and data mining in education: A bibliometrics study from 2010 to 2022’. Results show that data mining in education is a growing research field. There is also a significant difference between the publications in Scopus and WoS. The study found several research areas and topics, such as student academic performance prediction, e-learning, machine learning, and innovative data mining techniques, to be the core basis for collaborating and continuing current research in this field. These results highlight the importance of continuing research on data mining in education, guiding future research in tackling educational challenges.