Big Data in Education. A Bibliometric Review

Abstract

The handling of a large amount of data to analyze certain behaviors is reaching a great popularity in the decade 2010–2020. This phenomenon has been called Big Data. In the field of education, the analysis of this large amount of data, generated to a greater extent by students, has begun to be introduced in order to improve the teaching–learning process. In this paper, it was proposed as an objective to analyze the scientific production on Big Data in education in the databases Web of Science (WOS), Scopus, ERIC, and PsycINFO. A bibliometric study was carried out on a sample of 1491 scientific documents. Among the results, the increase in publications in 2017 and the configuration of certain journals, countries and authors as references in the subject matter stand out. Finally, potential explanations for the study findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.