Research Status of International Curriculum Integration Based on Bibliometrics

Abstract

With the development of the information technology the updating speed of knowledge is unprecedentedly accelerated. And the drawbacks of subject-based courses are increasingly exposed so that they are inappropriate to the current teaching. As a result, curriculum integration has become an inevitable trend of educational reform. In order to better understand the current status of international curriculum integration and analyze the research frontiers and research hotspots of curriculum integration, 2264 articles from Web of Science Core database were selected as the data source. This bibliometric study was conducted by means of visualization software CiteSpace. Cooperation of countries, institutions, authors, keywords and co-citations were analyzed and discussed in detail. It was found that the number of publications in the field of international curriculum integration will keep stably increasing and maintain a steady growth in the following years. Researchers collaborated closely, and USA are the most active countries in the research field of curriculum integration in terms of the number of scholarly outputs and collaborative exchanges. More and more Chinese scholars, not just American scholars, are beginning to pay attention to the field of curriculum integration. Now that research on curriculum integration has entered a steady development phase, concerns are given in learning ways and medical education. Combined with the current new situation of the development of curriculum integration, we find that medical education, particularly anatomical education, using IT in curriculum integration, STEM education and promoting teachers beliefs will be the research hotspot in the future.