If you want to comprehend the development of core ideas over a large body of literature, how best to do it? This article offers one compelling method: "From over 30 years of digital game-based learning development, 26 of the most influential studies are identified and visualized using Pajek software." Pajek is "a program package for analysis and visualization of large networks." Read about it here. It was used to conduct a cutation analysis of some 2156 articles and their data from The Web of Science database; the software creates a visual representation of developments in the field (illustrated here) that can be studied to identify trends. "The findings show two development phases for this field: exploring the role of gaming for educational purpose as well as facilitating learning performance." Now of course we might get different results from a broader set of literature, and it would be interesting compare consider different sorts of network analyses. But note how different this is from traditional literature analysis, and how looking at the relations between papers shows something very different than what we see when we just aggregate data.
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