Exploring the roots: Bibliometrics insights into early years science education
This bibliometric review traces the publication trends, seminal researchers, key journals, geographical distribution and funding of early years science education. Three research questions are considered: (a) what the trend of publications and citations from 2010 to 2024 is, (b) what the structure of authorship and collaboration networks is, and (c) what are the distribution of journals, countries, institutions and funding sponsors that define the field. A corpus of 83 articles was obtained, following screening, from the Scopus database using a structured Boolean search of the articles with a focus on children from the ages of 3-8 in science and STEM education. From 2010 to 2024, the number of articles published annually in the publication was between 1 and 13, reaching a peak of 13 in 2021, whereas the number of citations was between 5 and 218 in the same years, with its peak at 218 in 2023. Kallery, M. and Ravanis, K. were found to be the most productive authors and co-authorship network analysis showed growing interdisciplinary collaboration networks with few research groups at the center. The three most influential journals were found to be Research in Science Education, International Journal of Science Education, and Education Sciences. The top three nations in publications were Turkey, the United States, and Greece, with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the University of Patras being the most prolific institutions, and funding was highly concentrated, with a few research councils from the United States (the National Science Foundation), Germany (the Federal Ministry of Education and Research) and Sweden (the Swedish Research Council) making the bulk of the contributions. The overall picture on which these findings point is one of a gradually growing and geographically differentiated research base with clear directions for future scholarship and international cooperation with regard to early years science education.