Current research trends on socio-scientific issues and STEM education: a bibliometric analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59923/sendja.v4i3.962Keywords:
Bibliometric Study, Socio-Scientific Issues, STEM Education, Thematic AnalysisAbstract
Current research trends on socio-scientific issues and STEM education: a bibliometric analysis. STEM education aims to foster students’ 21st-century skills. However, teaching STEM alone without integrating social and environmental real-world context remains a problem. To bridge this gap, integrating socio-scientific issues into STEM learning by integrating real-world context support the development of problem-solving, decision-making and argumentation skills. Research on SSI in STEM education has expanded rapidly over the past decade across various sub-disciplines. However, comprehensive quantitative bibliometric mapping that systematically traces the global research trajectory, intellectual structure, key contributors, and thematic clusters of SSI in STEM education remains lacking. This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis that offers an objective, data-driven methodology to visualize knowledge domain structures, author networks, and publication shifts over time. We collected documents from the Scopus database, resulting in 281 final documents related to the implementation of SSI in STEM education published from 2016 to 2026. Several tools were utilized, including Microsoft Excel, OpenRefine, RStudio, Biblioshiny, and VOS viewer. The findings show that while SSI is originally concentrated in the United States, other countries such as Indonesia now rank second among the most productive nations, with Universitas Negeri Malang leads the most productive institution with 10 publications within the timeframe. The thematic analysis and keyword co-occurrence analysis show that teaching, learning, teacher training, climate change education, and STEM education are the most used author keywords, indicating that the article mainly discusses these topics.
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