Analysis of the scientific literature on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been gaining attention from Academy by the disruptive innovation with which technology is brought into the educational system. Due to the emergence of the theme, the area needs recent bibliometric studies that point at previous studies about it and indicate directions for further research. Therefore, this study aims to map MOOC researches on published until December 2014 in two scientific databases: Scopus and Web of Science. Relevant aspects of scientific literature on MOOCs were explored from the collected data such as: (i) the number of publications per year; (ii) mapping of the institutions; (iii) authors with the most publications; (iv) classification in macro-theme of the identified jobs and (v) references most used by the authors. For the analysis, it was used 294 papers written by 694 authors, affiliated with 266 institutions. In the articles analysed, the authors used 5,060 different references, as well as 634 different keywords. This work, in addition to a mapping of research, aims to contribute to the spreading of the idea that the MOOC theme is emerging, promising and it needs to go further in the development of new researches.