Analysis of the First Ten Years of the Journal of Engineering Education

The analysis of the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE) is extended to the ten year period from 1993 through 2002. The most common keywords remain teaching, computers and design although “assessment” and “ABET” became popular from 1998 to 2002. The most cited reference and author are ABET Criterion 2000 and Richard Felder, respectively. The median number of JEE citations of articles published in JEE during 1993 and 1994 is one. The number of papers with financial support increased by over 80 percent. NSF is the dominant source of support. Comparing the second five‐year period to the first five‐year period, there were increases in the percentages of papers reporting data, doing assessment, and using educational or learning theories. These results are consistent with a journal that is becoming more research oriented.     

Assessment in Engineering Education: Evolution,Approaches and Future Collaborations

This article examines the current state of assessment in engineering education in the United States as reflected in the Journal of Engineering Education. We begin with a brief review of recent developments in the assessment of engineering education and the events that have inspired change. Next, we explore assessment methodologies that have been used repeatedly in the evaluation of engineering courses, curricula, and research investigations as well as some methods that have not been used extensively but are likely to be informative. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of establishing collaborations between researchers in engineering education and educational research. Throughout this paper we highlight examples of sound and rigorous assessments in engineering education.     

Characteristics of Successful Cross‐disciplinary Engineering Education Collaborations

This article employs theory to demonstrate the characteristics of successful cross‐disciplinary engineering education collaborations. Specifically, we analyzed data from interviews with 24 recent Journal of Engineering Education authors from engineer‐nonengineer teams. Theoretical frameworks from education and psychology are used to ground the results and contribute to broader research on collaboration across technology and social science disciplines. The data suggest that the way an individual understands and appreciates the nature of knowledge affects the way he or she collaborates with colleagues in different academic disciplines, especially when the disciplines are fundamentally different. Although the literature criticizes engineers for not understanding or respecting other viewpoints, we found that nine engineers and eight nonengineers articulated awareness of their collaborators' perspectives, worked to integrate these into the research, and noted increased satisfaction and quality of work as a result. Recommendations for fostering this type of interdisciplinary integration in engineering education are offered along with suggestions for future research.     

Quantitative,Qualitative, and Mixed Research Methods in Engineering Education

The purpose of this research review is to open dialog about quantitative, qualitative, and mixed research methods in engineering education research. Our position is that no particular method is privileged over any other. Rather, the choice must be driven by the research questions. For each approach we offer a definition, aims, appropriate research questions, evaluation criteria, and examples from the Journal of Engineering Education. Then, we present empirical results from a prestigious international conference on engineering education research. Participants expressed disappointment in the low representation of qualitative studies; nonetheless, there appeared to be a strong preference for quantitative methods, particularly classroom‐based experiments. Given the wide variety of issues still to be explored within engineering education, we expect that quantitative, qualitative, and mixed approaches will be essential in the future. We encourage readers to further investigate alternate research methods by accessing some of our sources and collaborating across education/social science and engineering disciplinary boundaries.     

Ethics Instruction in Engineering Education: A (Mini) Meta‐Analysis

What are the objectives of engineering ethics? How is it being taught and how might instruction be more effective? The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) annual conference proceedings (1996–1999) contain 42 papers that treat engineering ethics as a coherent educational objective. Some of these papers disclose small components that seem to be part of a larger ethics curriculum. Other papers discuss engineering courses that are clearly the department's major ethics commitment. While it would be inappropriate to assume that the 42 papers represent the only means by which engineering students receive ethics instruction, these papers do present a variety of more‐or‐less defensible approaches and certainly the major intentional approaches of engineering curricula. This paper will develop an analysis of the 42 articles, including a discussion of where ethics is being taught (from both a chronological, and disciplinary perspective), and the six pedagogical approaches used to transfer an understanding of ethics to the student. These approaches include professional codes, humanist readings, theoretical grounding, ethical heuristics, case studies, and service learning. These six approaches will also be analyzed in terms of their promise to develop the ethical competencies needed by engineers.     

An Analysis of the Articles in the Journal of Engineering Education

Twenty issues of the Journal of Engineering Education from 1993 through 1997 were analyzed. The most common keywords used were teaching, design, and computers. An average of 10.4 percent of the articles require discipline specific knowledge for complete understanding. Approximately 60 percent of the articles included a teaching component, and most of these articles included an assessment. Only 13.4 percent of the articles used an educational theory. Women comprised 22 percent of all authors, but only 15.3 percent of authors who had a degree in engineering, computer science or engineering technology were women. The average number of usable references per article was 15.2. The mean number of times a source was cited is one. Only 20 sources were cited five or more times. Twenty-four authors or organizations were cited 10 or more times. Of the most-cited authors 48 percent do not have a degree in engineering, computer science or engineering technology. The keyword and citation analyses showed that the Journal has great breadth of both content and sources for references. The mean number of times articles published in the Journal during 1993 and 1994 were later cited in the Journal was zero. The content of the Journal has become more professional and the quality has improved in the five years studied.     

Center for Engineering Education: Colorado School of Mines

Faculty at the Colorado School of Mines have become increasing interested in engineering education research. In response to this interest, the Center for Engineering Education (CEE) was created in January 2000. CEE's activities are organized around Ernest Boyer's model of four types of scholarship: the scholarships of discovery, integration, application, and teaching. In addition to conducting research in engineering education, CEE also disseminates the results of that research through courses and seminars for faculty, graduate students, and the K‐12 community.     

A Look at the Past and Present of General Engineering and Engineering Science Programs

In this article we discuss engineering programs named Engineering (sometimes referred to as General Engineering) and Engineering Science. Our purpose is to explore the role such non‐specialized programs have played, and currently play, in the overall scheme of engineering education. There are currently forty‐eight programs offered at U.S. institutions with EAC/ABET accreditation under the name Engineering or Engineering Science. Such programs are typically characterized by a general or interdisciplinary nature, and as such do not have to satisfy any discipline‐specific EAC/ABET program criteria beyond the basic criteria. Our analysis of Engineering and Engineering Science programs consists of two parts. First, we explore the historical trends in the evolution of such programs. Then we examine their uses, their current status, and their prospects for the future.     

A K‐12/University Partnership: Creating Tomorrow's Engineers*

Supported by the National Science Foundation, the GK‐12 Fellows program at the University of Colorado at Boulder explores innovative ways for engineering graduate students to use engineering as the vehicle to provide K‐12 classroom instruction and hands‐on experiences that integrate physical sciences, mathematics, engineering and technology. Engineering “Fellows” fill a crucial gap in the two‐way exchange of content and pedagogy between the College of Engineering and Applied Science and the K‐12 community of learners. The active presence of real world, engineering role models in K‐12 classrooms improves the quality of math and science content, and introduces engineering to teachers and young students as a potential career path. Working through the University's graduate program legitimizes K‐12 outreach as a valid, and satisfying, academic endeavor for graduate students.     

A Recent View of Engineering Education in Pakistan

Engineering education in Pakistan receives less attention from governmental quarters than its importance to the country would justify. Evidence of the fact is that of the 24 universities established in Pakistan since the nation was founded, only six offer engineering. Thus the country has been unable to produce the needed manpower for its development. Furthermore, the meager national investment in engineering education offers little hope of improvement. Similarly, the total human resource output from the universities is unimpressive. In the four‐year study period reported in this paper, less than eight percent of the enrolled candidates were successful in earning post‐graduate degrees.¹ Only one percent of these had begun doctorate level research, with none receiving degrees by the end of the period. This paper reviews academic trends affecting engineering students and their priorities. Graduation rates and governmental financial support for the study period have been statistically analyzed.     

Engineering Identity

Engineering for a Changing World: A Roadmap to the Future of Engineering Practice, Research, and Education: By James J. Duderstadt On the Outskirts of Engineering: Learning Identity, Gender, and Power via Engineering Practice: By Karen L. Tonso     

Engineering Accreditation and Standards for Technological Literacy

This article provides an overview of how the International Technology Education Association's Standards for Technological Literacy: Content for the Study of Technology and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology's Engineering Criteria 2000's Criterion 3 Program Outcomes and Assessment focus on producing secondary school and engineering graduates with an enhanced level of technological literacy and competency. These documents, providing guidelines for pre‐college through undergraduate education, are intended to promote improvement in the quality and quantity of engineering students and to enhance the level of technological literacy of pre‐college teachers and their students.     

A survey of Quality Engineering–Management journals by bibliometric indicators

This paper analyses some of the most popular scientific journals in the Quality field from the point of view of three bibliometric indicators: the Hirsch (h) index for journals, the total number of citations and the h‐spectrum. In particular, h‐spectrum is a novel tool based on h, making it possible to (i) identify a reference profile of the typical authors of a journal; (ii) compare different journals; and (iii) provide a rough indication of their ‘bibliometric positioning’ in the scientific community. Results of this analysis can be helpful for guiding potential authors and members of the scientific community in the Quality Engineering/Management area. A large amount of empirical data are presented and discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A decade of database research publications: a look inside

The database management technology has played a vital role in the advancements of the information technology field. Database researchers are one of the key players and main sources to the growth of the database systems. They are playing a foundational role in creating the technological infrastructure from which database advancements evolve. We analyze the database research publications of nine top-tier and prestigious database research venues. In particular, we study the publications of four major core database technology conferences (SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, EDBT), two main theoretical database conferences (PODS, ICDT) and three database journals (TODS, VLDB Journal, TKDE) over a period of 10 years (2001–2010). Our analysis considers only regular papers as we do not include short papers, demo papers, posters, tutorials or panels into our statistics. In this study, we report the list of the authors with the highest number of publications for each conference/journal separately and in combined. We analyze the preference of the database research community towards publishing their work in prestigious conferences or major database journals. We report about the most successful co-authorship relationships in the database research community in the last decade. Finally, we analyze the growth in the number of research publications and the size of the research community in the last decade.     

Journal citation identity, journal citation image and internationalisation: Methods for journal evaluation

Summary Journal Citation Identity, Journal Citation Image, and Internationalisation are methods for journal evaluation used for an analysis of the Journal of Documentation(JDOC) which is compared to JASIS(T) and the Journal of Information Science(JIS). The set of analyses contributes to portrait a journal and gives a multifaceted picture. For instance, the Journal Citation Image by the New Journal Diffusion Factor tells that JDOC reaches farther out into the scientific community than the JASIS(T) and JIS. Comparing New Journal Diffusion Factor and Journal Impact Factor illustrates how new information has been added by the new indicator. Furthermore, JDOC is characterised by a higher rate of journal diversity in the references and has a lower number of scientific publications. JDOC authors and citers are affiliated Western European institutions at an increasing rate.     

Where demographics meets scientometrics: towards a dynamic career analysis

In computer science, as opposed to many other disciplines, papers published in conference and workshop proceedings count as formal publications when evaluating the scholarship of an academic. We consider the relationship between high quality journals and conferences in the computer vision (CV) subfield of computer science. We determined that 30% of papers in the top-3 CV journals base their work on top-3 conference papers by the same authors (which we call priors (See “Methods” section for the definition of a prior)). Journal papers with priors are significantly more cited than journal papers without priors. Also the priors themselves are cited more than other papers from the conferences. For a period of 3–5 years after the journal paper publication, the priors receive more citations than the follow-up journal paper. After that period, the journal paper starts receiving most of the citations. Furthermore, we found that having the prior conference paper did not make it any easier (faster) to publish in a journal. We also surveyed journal authors and based on their answers and the priors analysis, we discovered that authors seem to be divided into different groups depending on their preferred method of publication.     

Be known by the company you keep: Citations — quality or chance?

We examine the determinants of five year citations to papers published in the American Economic Review and the Economic Journal. Citations are positively related to page length and position in the journal. Both of these variables are consistent with the hypothesis that citations reflect paper quality, as is the number of subsequent self-citations. However, the publication of a major paper, as judged by subsequent citations, significantly increases the citations of other papers in an issue and this indicates the importance of chance in determining citations.     

The distribution of reference citations in two agricultural journals

The average numbers of references cited in papers published inN. Z. Journal of Experimental Agriculture (JEA) andN. Z. Journal of Agricultural Research (JAR) are compared. The papers inJAR have a greater number of references per paper than doJEA papers, probably becauseJAR papers are longer.ForJEA papers there is a steady increase in the average number of references per paper as the number of authors per paper increases. ForJAR there is no such steady increase but there is a marked increase in the average number of references per paper for 3- and 4+-author papers.There is a clear difference betweenJEA andJAR papers in the distribution of references between the different sections of the text. ForJEA papers 49% of references are cited in the Introduction and 52% are cited in the Results & Discussion sections. ForJAR the figures are 38% and 65% respectively.It is suggested that the distribution of cited references in the different sections of the text may be an indicator of the appliedness of a paper or of a journal.