How authors did it – a methodological analysis of recent engineering education research papers in the European Journal of Engineering Education

Journal article, 2018

We investigated research processes applied in recent publications in the
European Journal of Engineering Education (EJEE), exploring how papers
link to theoretical work and how research processes have been designed
and reported. We analysed all 155 papers published in EJEE in 2009, 2010
and 2013, classifying the papers using a taxonomy of research processes
in engineering education research (EER) (Malmi et al. 2012). The majority
of the papers presented either empirical work (59%) or were case reports
(27%). Our main findings are as follows: (1) EJEE papers build moderately
on a wide selection of theoretical work; (2) a great majority of papers
have a clear research strategy, but data analysis methods are mostly
simple descriptive statistics or simple/undocumented qualitative research
methods; and (3) there are significant shortcomings in reporting research
questions, methodology and limitations of studies. Our findings are
consistent with and extend analyses of EER papers in other publishing
venues; they help to build a clearer picture of the research currently
published in EJEE and allow us to make recommendations for
consideration by the editorial team of the journal. Our employed
procedure also provides a framework that can be applied to monitor
future global evolution of this and other EER journals.