Thirty years of educational research in Saudi Arabia: a bibliometric study

This article performs bibliometric analysis to study the contributions of Saudi institutions in the education field in journals indexed in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED). Publications from 1991 to 2020 were assessed. Characteristics of document types, publication outputs, Web of Science categories and journals, and publication performances in terms of quantity for countries and institutes were investigated. To investigate performance quality, citation histories of the most frequently cited articles in the 30 years and the most frequently cited articles in 2020 were examined. The number of citations from the WoS Core Collection in the most recent year, total number of citations since the publication year 2020, and citations per publication were used to evaluate publication performances. Results showed that educational research articles were substantially published in the last decade. The most number of articles were published in the category of scientific disciplines education, followed by the education and educational research category. For international collaboration, Saudi Arabia had the most number of international collaborations with the US. However, articles that were collaborated with Germany had the highest impact. King Saud University was the most productive institution in terms of high-quantity and high-quality published articles.

Automated summary

This article uses bibliometric analysis to study the contributions of Saudi institutions in the education field and their international collaborations. The study found a significant increase in the number of educational research articles published in the past decade, with scientific disciplines education and education research being the most frequently published categories. Saudi Arabia had the highest number of international collaborations with the US, but articles collaborated with Germany had the highest impact. King Saud University was the most productive institution in terms of both quantity and quality of published articles.