BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS IN DETERMINING THE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS OF EARLY CAREER RESEARCHERS

Abstract

The paper offers an overview of publications on the use of bibliometric analysis in various scientific studies. It was found out that the use of the scientific mapping tool to carry out such analysis at the stage of identifying early career scientists’ research directions has not been previously explored. A sample statistical survey of 68 supervisors of Master’s research from the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine and Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University revealed that research supervisors with little experience, as well as supervisors in the field of social sciences and the humanities, lag behind in the use of channels and tools of modern digital scholarly communications. It is suggested that the use of built-in tools of bibliometric systems for systematic analysis aimed at determining the directions of Master’s research will contribute to the quality of Master’s theses, and hence to the development of university science in the context of its integration into the global research space. The authors propose a case of applying scientific mapping for the queries for search of scientific publications in Scopus and Web of Science (WOS) scientometric databases, based on the research areas of the Department of Informatics and Methods of Its Teaching of Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University. The paper describes approaches to the use of VOSviewer to produce terminological maps based on concepts occurring in the titles, keywords and abstracts of the relevant sets of scientific publications. Since the Department offers Master’s programs for students majoring both in Education/Pedagogy (014 Secondary Education (Informatics)) and Information Technology (122 Computer Science), on the basis of the analysis of links in thesauri from the Web of Science and Scopus data sets the authors identified research directions and provided examples of research themes for Master’s theses majoring in Educational Technology and Information Technology, respectively. The results of the conducted survey and in-depth interviews with Master’s students’ research supervisors showed the expediency of expanding the pedagogical experiment aimed at the development of the methods of systematic literature review at various stages of working on a Master’s thesis, involving the use of a wide range of bibliographic analysis tools. The results presented in the paper can be useful both for early career researchers and their research supervisors.