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A bibliometric analysis of Research on Education 4.0 during the 2017–2021 period

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Abstract

A bibliometric analysis of 309 publications related to Education 4.0 published in both Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases has been conducted to analyze the development of this research field since the first articles published in 2017. Although being an emerging field, the number of publications increased quickly. Scholars from developing countries (i.e., Malaysia, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, and Philippines) are among the most productive authors, but internal and cross-country collaborations between them are very limited. Quality of the publication collection is not high as within the top ten most popular journals, five journals are not qualified to the Scopus database since 2020, and only three journals belong to the WoS core collections. Research topics related to Education 4.0 can be classified into five main clusters, including application of modern technologies on Education 4.0, effects of Industry 4.0 on teaching and learning activities, Education 4.0 in engineering education, education innovations in Education 4.0, and empirical research and quantitative analyses using questionnaires on different aspects of Education 4.0.

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Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from Scopus and Web of Science databases, but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Massimo Aria and Corrado Cuccurullo for developing the “Biblioshiny”, the bibliographic analysis tool used for data processing and data visualization in this work. We would like to thank our colleagues, Binh Pham-Duc and Ho Nguyen for providing bibliographic data for this work.

Funding

This work has been supported by the Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED), under the grant number 503.01-2020.01.

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Correspondence to Trung Tran.

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Dao, L.T., Tran, T., Van Le, H. et al. A bibliometric analysis of Research on Education 4.0 during the 2017–2021 period. Educ Inf Technol 28, 2437–2453 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11211-4

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