Realistic Mathematics Education: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The aim of the study is to conduct a bibliometrical analysis on the published articles related to RME. Accordingly, Scopus database was scanned using the keywords “realistic mathematics education” or “realistic mathematic education” or “realistic maths” or “realistic mathematical education” and a total number of 1190 articles published on RME between 1986 and 2021 were obtained and anayzed bibliometrically. The data gathered was then analyzed utilizing “biblioshiny”, which is a web interface app in the bibliometric R-Studio program package. The analyses were conducted in order to find out the sample of the articles’ annual distributions; their 3-D area chart; the list of the journals that published the highest number of related articles; the authors and their institutions; source clusters obtained through Bradford’s Law, the scientific productivity of the authors by years and their citation burst scores; the scientific productivity of the countries; the word cloud and word tree patterns of these articles; co-word analysis of the concepts, the collaboration networks of the authors and the conceptual structure mapping. The findings obtained as a result of the conducted analyses indicate that there has been an increase in the interest in RME research after 2016 and the journal with the highest number of published articles on RME is Journal on Mathematics Education. Also, the authors with the highest numbers of publications are Z. Zulkardi, S. Suparman and R. I. I. Putri, respectively, while Utrecht University has the highest number of publications on the topic. The countries with the highest rates of productivity in terms of publications on RME are found to be the USA, Indonesia, and the Netherlands, respectively. In addition, the most frequently used keyword by the researchers is found to be “realistic mathematics education”, while “mathematics” is the most frequently utilized word in the titles of the analyzed articles. The overall findings of the study point out the need for further studies on RME as realistic mathematics education is considered to be a significant method in finding solutions to the problems in the field of mathematics education. Further theoretical contributions are also thought to be crucial as they could provide fundamental references for future research.