Bibliographic Data Analysis of CDIO Conference Papers from 2005-2018

Paper in proceeding, 2019

Tools for bibliometric data analysis offer opportunities to analyze the evolution of a field of study over time. VOSViewer is a popular tool for such analyses, allowing the user to create and interpret visualizations of publication data, such as word co-occurrence analysis, co-authorship networks, and geographic patterns of collaboration. Meikleham et al. (2018) previously demonstrated the utility of applying this analysis to engineering education publication data from Scopus and Web of Science. By conducting a temporal analysis, the authors demonstrated how geographic, co-authorship networks and key thematic trends changed over time.A limitation to the results found in Meikleham et al. (2018) was that, at the time of the analysis, publications from the CDIO Knowledge Library (CDIO Initiative, 2018) could not be included due to an incompatible data structure. VOSViewer requires publication metadata to be structured according to a particular standardized format, and this prevented the Knowledge Library data from being used. Over the past year, the data has been restructured for analysis as reported in this paper. The basis of the current work is a revision of the database schema for the CDIO Knowledge Library that has enabled export of CDIO conference papers to the Scopus format and subsequent import into VOSViewer for analysis. The data shows that researchers from 47 countries have contributed to the CDIO Knowledge Library with Sweden taking the lead with the maximum number of publications. Researchers tend to collaborate with the same co-authors over a period of time, thus forming networks or clusters of researchers. Each cluster of researchers tends to publish their work independently of other clusters. A newer network of authors has formed in the past 4 to 5 years who collaborate locally within a geographical region. This indicates a presence of local CDIO communities which have not yet integrated with the global CDIO community. In decreasing order of influence, CDIO Standards 8, 7, 3 and 5 have been the major focus of CDIO publications from 2005 until 2018 as indicated in the data included in this analysis.