Abstract

The purpose of this study is to perform bibliometric analysis of the scientific researches published in mathematics education subject area between 1980 and 2018, to find out the general layout of the scientific knowledge and communication structure of the field using an objective method, driven from the data. The publications were analyzed according to publication year, type of publication, language of publication, title of publication, name of the author, country of the author and number of citations taken from the sources scanned in Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database; structural and temporal analysis of various networks, such as collaboration networks and author collaborations were performed. In addition, a word analysis was also conducted in the study to determine the concepts used in the researches published in mathematics education area and covered in the data set. It was found that the publications involving mathematics education increased from 1980 to 2018. The review of the countries according to the number of studies that they have performed in the field revealed that the most productive countries are United States, England and Turkey. Regarding the centrality of the countries in the network, the countries that are located at the center of the network were found to be England, US and Spain, respectively. Regarding the ranking of the countries according to the number of citations taken for the scientific works that they have performed in mathematics education area, it was found that US, Turkey and Malaysia had the highest number of citation bursts. Regarding the ranking of the works according to title, the topics that have been mostly worked on are elementary mathematics classroom, teacher education and achievement gap. The words that are mostly used in mathematics education research area were mathematics, education, student and achievement, respectively.

Key words: Social network analysis, bibliometric analysis, mathematics education, scientific knowledge, scientific communication.