Status and trends of socioscientific issues in educational literature: insights and extensions from a co-word analysis

The current study identified recent trends in socioscientific issues (SSIs) in the field of education. Through descriptive analysis and co-word analysis, selected articles published in journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index and Scopus from 2000 to 2021 were screened. A total of 334 papers were retrieved as research target samples from the Web of Science and Scopus databases after many rounds of searching and filtering. An analysis revealed an overall growing trend of SSI-related publications in the field of education. High-impact journals that published SSI-related research and highly cited articles were also identified. A series of co-word analyses were then conducted to determine co-occurring relationships among the keywords of the sample papers. This study extracted 39 author-defined keywords shared by at least three studies in the target samples. The analytic results indicated that ‘argumentation,’ ‘decision-making,’ ‘scientific literacy,’ and ‘knowledge’ were frequently used along with SSI as keywords. The co-word networks of the whole corpus of keywords and selected keywords were visualised to refine the common understanding of the educators and obtain the SSI research foci. This paper also offers future research directions.