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People, Ideas, Milestones: A Scientometric Study of Computational Thinking

Published:02 March 2021Publication History
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Abstract

The momentum around computational thinking (CT) has kindled a rising wave of research initiatives and scholarly contributions seeking to capitalize on the opportunities that CT could bring. A number of literature reviews have showed a vibrant community of practitioners and a growing number of publications. However, the history and evolution of the emerging research topic, the milestone publications that have shaped its directions, and the timeline of the important developments may be better told through a quantitative, scientometric narrative. This article presents a bibliometric analysis of the drivers of the CT topic, as well as its main themes of research, international collaborations, influential authors, and seminal publications, and how authors and publications have influenced one another. The metadata of 1,874 documents were retrieved from the Scopus database using the keyword “computational thinking.” The results show that CT research has been US-centric from the start, and continues to be dominated by US researchers both in volume and impact. International collaboration is relatively low, but clusters of joint research are found between, for example, a number of Nordic countries, lusophone- and hispanophone countries, and central European countries. The results show that CT features the computing’s traditional tripartite disciplinary structure (design, modeling, and theory), a distinct emphasis on programming, and a strong pedagogical and educational backdrop including constructionism, self-efficacy, motivation, and teacher training.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Transactions on Computing Education
      ACM Transactions on Computing Education  Volume 21, Issue 3
      September 2021
      188 pages
      EISSN:1946-6226
      DOI:10.1145/3452111
      Issue’s Table of Contents

      Copyright © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

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      Publication History

      • Published: 2 March 2021
      • Accepted: 1 December 2020
      • Revised: 1 November 2020
      • Received: 1 April 2020
      Published in toce Volume 21, Issue 3

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