Bibliometric analysis on global e-learning literature in Web of Science database: with special reference to Sri Lankan context

Abstract

Study of existing literature on e-learning trend is a must in order to define the path for new research in the field. The objective of this study is to find the full range of scientific literature published since the emergence of the concept of e-learning. The researcher intended to get all of the literature published in the Sri Lankan context. Web of Science database search was carried out in January 2020 to understand the research trend. This study found 6934 results for e-learning after performing a basic search in Web of Science. This results covered 59784 citations. Though multilingual literature was found, 6,617 (95.43%) items were published in English language. Though different types of documents were included in the search result, journal articles were predominant with 5839 (84.21%) instances. USA and England accounted for 1003 (14.24%) and 828 (11.75%) papers respectively, which placed them as the countries that contributed the most. Considering the subject area broadly, the literature has been classified into 25 disciplines of which 1843 (26.57%) of publications falling into the Educational research category. The average number of citations per publication is recorded as 14.4. The top 25 institutions have published 1245 papers that received a total of 8026 citations excluding self- citations. The University of London is the most productive organization, has published 131 papers on e-learning. Among the authors, Huang, Yong-Ming of Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology has published the most number of papers (19) on e- learning.