A Bibliometric Analysis of Blended Learning in Higher Education: Perception, Achievement and Engagement

Abstract

This article presents a bibliometric analysis of publications on blended learning in higher education. The analysis is grounded on statistics obtained from the online Scopus database on 11 December 2019. The study used Microsoft Excel to conduct a frequency analysis, VOSviewer for data visualization, and Harzing’s Publish or Perish for citation metrics and analysis. In total 1,064 valid documents were analyzed, based on keyword search results for “blended learning”, “perception”, “achievement”, “engagement”, “higher education” and “bibliometric analysis”. This article reports descriptive and content analysis on document type and source type. Analysis shows that number of publications per year increased from 2000 to 2018. English is the most widely used language for publications, and most publications are from the social sciences. The United States contributes the most publications. The most active journals, influential institutions, citation metrics and highly cited articles are listed. Network visualization maps demonstrate keyword analysis of author keywords; co-authorship by country and author; number of authors per document; citations by country and document; co-occurrence of all keywords; and, lastly, co-citation by cited sources. The visibility of work on blended learning in highly cited journals in the past two decades reveals that blended learning has gained significant attention among educators and researchers. Future research could include systematic literature reviews or other mapping tools, such as HistCite.