The development trend of educational neuroscience: A bird’s eye view of the literature over 50 years

摘要: Methods:To examine the development of EN research, we did a search of the relevant literature over the past half-century (1966–2015). EN related empirical studies were identified from three databases (ie, SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, and A&HCI) within Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection by using a list of neuroimaging techniques (ie, EEG, fMRI, MRI, fNIRS, NIRS, MEG, PET, tDCS, and TMS) as topic terms and by limiting our results to the WoS research area" Education & Educational Research". The initial search yielded 518 English articles. We then screened the articles' titles, abstracts, and full text when necessary to identified 196 (38%) articles that are actually EN related empirical studies using the specified neuroimaging techniques. These articles form the core set of EN publications for further analysis. To investigate the trend of EN research over the past 50 years, we recorded the change in the number of publications, the target participants, the source journals as well as the neuroimaging techniques employed.Results:In the past 50 years, 196 EN related empirical studies were published in journals within the" Education & Educational Research" area of WoS. Figure 1 shows the number of publications in EN during 1966-2015. In general, a gradual growth in the number of EN publications is observed except for the spikes in 2011 and 2013. Before the 1990s, articles appear sporadically over the years. Since the 1990s, however, publications can be seen in almost every year. There is an average of about 16 EN publications per year in the past recent decade (2006–2015), compared to only about two or even less per year in the decades before.