Evolution of Engineering Education Research in Portugal and Spain: a scientometric study

Abstract

This paper contributes to the growing body of work that analyses the growth of engineering education research (EER) as a global field of inquiry. It uses a computer-aided process to compare the evolution of EER in Portugal and Spain. This is achieved by extracting the names of the Portuguese and Spanish authors that published in a sample of 12 different journals in the years 2018 and 2019 and then carrying out a computer-curated scientometric analysis of their complete publishing careers in both specialised engineering fields and in EER. For a sample of 50 Portuguese and 285 Spanish authors we present data taken from 14,121 publications that allow us to show the percentage of their publications that are educationally focused and how this in turn impacts their h-index. We also calculate how early in their career they published their first educational paper. Differences between researchers active in the field of EER from Portugal and Spain are identified, the most notable being the tendency for a large number of Spanish authors to publish in specific EER journals and we suggest possible explanations for the findings.