Bibliometric Analysis of Game-Based Researches in Educational Research

Abstract

This research aims to conduct a bibliometric study to describe how game-based educational research is structured and how it has evolved over time. For this purpose, bibliometric analysis has been used to analyze 4980 publications indexed by the Elsevier SCOPUS database between 1967 and May 2021. The related publications were evaluated by analyzing co-authorship, co-occurrence, and citation by considering author, keyword, country, journal, university, and publication variables. As a result of the bibliometric analysis, it was concluded that the United States was leading the field and significantly publishing more studies. Top performing organizations were in Taiwan and the United States. According to the keyword co-occurrence analysis, "game-based learning" was the most used keyword followed by "serious games" and "gamification". Co-authorship status results show that collaboration between researchers in the field was not high and the number of researchers in co-author groups was small. It was found that the most influential research was related to literature review on games and the effectiveness of games on motivation or learning and Computers & Education was the most published and cited journal in game-based educational research.