Co-citations Map: Literature review on Learning Ecologies, 1991-2018

The co-citation map was adopted as type of analysis over 85 papers sampled from five scientific databases (pls. cfr: Systematic Review on the Research Topic "Learning Ecologies" - Dataset and Analysis". This was adopted as method to further understand the relationships and advancement of work relating the concept of LE.

The software tool to carry out this phase of the study was Citenet Explorer for the analysis and visualization of co-citations along the period 1999-2018.

The total number of citations and the relationships between most cited authors and all authors were extracted from the corpus analyzed (Systematic Review on the Research Topic "Learning Ecologies" - Dataset and Analysis"; a specific dataset was created and the outputs were processed by the specialized software that delivers the bibliometric maps as output.

All the instructions to use the two files that compose the dataset requested by the software, as well as the software specifications can be found at CiteNet Explore page: http://www.citnetexplorer.nl/ 

Finally, the Fig. 7 with the analysis we performed shows the co-citations map, where at a first sight it is possible to see two main groups of nodes or authors cited (X axis) across a timespan (Y axis), and sparse elements at the center and at the beginning of the period (1991). The main and more compact group (also in terms of clusterisation of nodes, which are showed in green) related the publications that cite the seminal work of Barron (2004). These publications are mostly classified as using socio-constructivist theories and are placed in the area of social sciences, while for other categories (such as the methodological approach, research applications and the alignment are more fragmented).  There are four seminal works (Abd-El-Khalick & Akerson, 2004; Barron, 2004; T ; Okamoto, Kayama, Inoue, & Cristea, 2002; Toshio Okamoto & Kayama, 2004) to which other papers can be connected. Beyond the mentioned work of Barron, the other three works can be placed in the area of technology (development of eLearning environments) and STEM education, supporting the idea of disciplinary fragmentation.