How authors did it - a methodological analysis of recent engineering education research papers in the European Journal of Engineering Education.

Malmi, Lauri; Adawi, Tom; Curmi, Ronald; de Graaff, Erik; Duffy, Gavin; Kautz, Christian; Kinnunen, Päivi; Williams, Bill

We investigated research processes applied in recent publications in the <italic>European Journal of Engineering Education</italic> (<italic>EJEE</italic>), exploring how papers link to theoretical work and how research processes have been designed and reported. We analysed all 155 papers published in <italic>EJEE</italic> in 2009, 2010 and 2013, classifying the papers using a taxonomy of research processes in engineering education research (EER) (Malmi et al. 2012). The majority of the papers presented either empirical work (59%) or were case reports (27%). Our main findings are as follows: (1) <italic>EJEE</italic> papers build moderately on a wide selection of theoretical work; (2) a great majority of papers have a clear research strategy, but data analysis methods are mostly simple descriptive statistics or simple/undocumented qualitative research methods; and (3) there are significant shortcomings in reporting research questions, methodology and limitations of studies. Our findings are consistent with and extend analyses of <italic>EER</italic> papers in other publishing venues; they help to build a clearer picture of the research currently published in <italic>EJEE</italic> and allow us to make recommendations for consideration by the editorial team of the journal. Our employed procedure also provides a framework that can be applied to monitor future global evolution of this and other <italic>EER</italic> journals.

ENGINEERING education; EDUCATION research; SCHOLARLY publishing; EUROPEAN Journal of Engineering Education (Periodical); RESEARCH methodology; TAXONOMY; ADULTS; HIGHER education

European Journal of Engineering Education, 2018, Vol 43, Issue 2, p171

0304-3797

Academic Journal

10.1080/03043797.2016.1202905