Impacts of citations on conceptual change articles between 1982 and 2011: From international and regional perspectives

The purpose of this book chapter is to investigate the impacts of research articles on conceptual change field via the analysis of citations listed in a set of selected journal articles. According to our screening processes, we found 365 articles in the selected science education journals (Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Science Education, International Journal of Science Education, Research in Science Education, International Journal of Mathematics and Science Education) and 17,919 citations were included in the articles. Out of 365, there were 78 articles that had Asian scholars as either the first author or the corresponding persons. Among them, there were 3710 citations in these Asian studies. From the analyses, we found that Posner et al. (Sci Educ 66(2): 211-227, 1982) was the most cited article across the world, followed by Strike and Posner (Cognitive structure and conceptualchange. Academic Press, New York, pp. 211-231, 1992) and Pintrich et al. (RevEduc Res 63(2): 167-199, 1993). However, there were some differences of the orderings of the cited research articles in Asia except the first one, Posner et al. (SciEduc 66(2): 211-227, 1982). In terms of the authors, we found Driver as the most influential researcher in the area of conceptual change compared to others across the world. This holds true in Asia as well. However, the orderings of the cited authors were quite different between global and regional aspects. These findings might show specific preferences or impacts of research directions globally and locally. Detailed analyses and implications will be discussed.