Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ A scientometric analysis of global scientific literature on learning resources in higher education

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This article (14 page PDF) strikes me as an object lesson in how important it is to choose the right data to analyze. The authors looked at 4489 scientific articles on higher education between 1970 and 2022 from the Web Of Science database. The first sign that this is a seriously flawed data set comes with the identification of Nicolas Salamin, a biologist from the University of Lausanne, as the most frequent contributor with 20 articles. I can think offhand of dozens of authors who have contributed more than 20 papers to the field; clearly, though, they are not recorded in the Web Of Science database. So what do we make of the conclusions offered by the authors, for example, "the lack of collaboration between authors related to research on learning resources in HE?" Not to be too harsh, but this study isn't worth the paper it isn't written on.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 25, 2024 08:12 a.m.

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