The Research Map helps education leaders, policymakers, and technology developers quickly access education and learning science research findings that can inform their work.
The map was built using data from over 100,000 articles published between 2007 and 2016, found in 184 academic journals from the Web of Science database. We analyzed the bibliographic record (title, keywords, author, cited references, and abstract) for each article and created a bibliographic coupling network, to link articles sharing at least two common references.
Next, we used an algorithm to detect groups of articles with densely shared links. In the Network View, articles belonging to the same group are gathered into nodes, or circles, which we call “topics.” The circle size is proportional to the number of articles it contains. Similarly, the width of a border arc of color in the Chord View is proportional to the number of articles it contains. In both map views, the thickness of the lines (or chords) between topics indicates how strongly they are connected. Then, we applied the same algorithm to the articles in each topic to split them into subtopics.