The challenge of discovering the threshold concepts of medical research areas: a bibliometrics-based approach Santisteban-Espejo, Antonio Moral-Muñoz, Jose Antonio Martín Piedra, Miguel Ángel Campos Muñoz, Antonio Jesús Bilbiometrics Biomedical research Learning During the last XX century, several changes were applied to traditional educational methods, positioning the student as a central actor in the learning process. One of the pedagogical theories developed was the Threshold Concepts (TC) educational framework, based on education as a space of uncertainty, where the student needs to learn a certain concept or learning experiences that allow developing a new way of thinking. In medical education, written accounts about significant learning experiences, analysis of practice essays and semi-structured focus groups interviews have been applied to identify TC. In that way, our hypothesis is that the use of bibliometrics, as a tool to discover hidden relations between keywords, can overcome traditional difficulties related to TC identification. Keywords are applied to highlight the content of a digital object; they are concepts with a special meaning, similar to TC. Our challenge is to identify the bibliometric indexes that are able to show the relationship between the keywords that make them TC, especially in a medical context. In previous scientific literature, several methods were applied, mainly based on qualitative assessment. In this sense, we propose a quantitative, objective, and reproducible approach that can enrich the learning process from a scientific-based perspective. 2024-03-18T10:57:00Z 2024-03-18T10:57:00Z 2020-10 journal article Santisteban-Espejo A, Moral-Munoz JA, Campos A, Martin-Piedra MA. The challenge of discovering the threshold concepts of medical research areas: A bibliometrics-based approach. Med Hypotheses. 2020;143:110099. doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2020.110099 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/90073 10.1016/j.mehy.2020.110099 eng Medical Hypotheses;143 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Elsevier