Trends in Highly Cited Empirical Research in STEM Education: a Literature Review

The development of STEM education scholarship takes time and collective effort. Identifying and examining trends in highly cited empirical STEM education research over time will help inform the field and future research. In this study, we searched the Web of Science core database to identify the top 100 most-cited empirical research journal publications in each of three consecutive years. Our analyses revealed consistencies and important changes over the years in terms of the inclusion of articles themselves, the journals where they were published, disciplinary content coverage, and research topics. The results demonstrate that STEM education research is increasingly recognized as important in education, both through publications and citations, and that the field is moving toward conducting more multi- and interdisciplinary STEM education research.