A keyword based scheme to define engineering education research as a field and its members

In the last three decades, engineering education research (EER) has made remarkable progress towards a field of interdisciplinary scholarship. This paper defines EER by developing a keyword-based scheme for exploring EER-related scientific publications and collaboration. The keyword-based scheme refers to a conceptual framework we have developed for generating a parsimonious list of keywords which are salient in EER. The generated keywords were used to collect bibliographic records from ISI Web of Science® (WoS), a citation index providing access to the world's leading citation databases and journals. To perform a comprehensive search for EER-related literature by employing the range of truncation rules and the advanced search options available in WoS, the project makes following contributions to the current knowledge base on interdisciplinary research in EE: (1) engineering education research is operationalized as a sophisticated and systematically derived set of keywords and (2) the method of the current study may serve as a significant step towards quantitative analysis of new scientific field.