Examining the Trend of Research on Computational Thinking

A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

This study presents a bibliometric analysis of top papers published in the research of computational thinking (CT) between 2006 and 2020, retrieved from the Scopus database. Based on the keywords used, which are related to computational thinking in the article title, the study retrieved 1422 documents for further analysis using various tools. Microsoft Excel was used to conduct frequency analysis, VOSviewer for data visualization, and Harzing’s Publish or Perish for citation metrics and analysis. This study reports the results using ordinary bibliometric indicators such as the growth of publications, authorship patterns, collaboration, and prolific authors, country contribution, most active institutions, preferred journals, top-cited articles, top subject area, and top keywords analysis. The findings shows there is a continuous growth of publications on computational thinking research for 14 years since 2006. United States of America was the largest contributor to computational thinking research, followed by the People’s Republic of China. In terms of publication, the ACM International Conference Proceeding Series published the most number of publications related to computational thinking research. Through VOSviewer software, the findings depict co-authorship and bibliographic couplings of authors and their affiliated institutions and countries, co-citations of journals, and co-occurrence of an author-specified keyword