Digital transformation in education: Digital transformation in education: a bibliometric analysis using Scopus a bibliometric analysis using Scopus

Background: Digital transformation refers to applying digital technology in various fields of society. In the last 5 years, digital transformation has spread to most areas of social life, including education. However, research on digital transformation in education is still fragmented. Objectives: The aim of the study was to present a comprehensive review of studies on digital transformation in education using bibliometric analysis. Methods: We searched the Scopus database from inception to 1 January 2023 using the search terms ‘digital transformation’ AND ‘education’ within abstracts, keywords, or titles of journal articles or conference papers written in English. The retrieved articles were analysed using VOSviewer and Biblioshiny tools. Results: A total of 1329 relevant studies were retrieved. Although the first paper in this field was published in 1999, the number of publications has increased rapidly only in the past 4 years. The most influential countries in this field are the developed countries (Russian Federation, Germany, and the United States), but scholars from the developing countries (Indonesia and Thailand) are among the most productive. Papers on digital transformation are frequently published in journals with lower rankings within the Scopus database. Using VOSviewer for keyword co-occurrence analysis, we classified the research topics related to digital transformation in educa - tion into four main groups: digital transformation in higher education under the impact of the coronavirus disease pandemic 2019 pandemic, applying the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to education, digitization and digital competence in education in the context of digital transformation, and learning forms using technology (for example, e-learning, m-learning, and blended learning) in higher-education institutions. Conclusions: Four research trends related to digital transformation in education were identified. These trends may also change as digital transformation continues to develop.


Introduction
Digital transformation covers many concepts, such as virtual reality, self-driving cars, threedimensional printing, and cloud computing.

Digital transformation in education creates
opportunities to change educational methods and models to help learners access new knowledge more effectively.Research on digital transformation in education is being done in many ways, including technology integration to facilitate learning using interactive applications, virtual reality, and augmented reality. 1 Digital transformation also provides opportunities for online learning and blended learning (in which students learn using electronic and online media as well as traditional face-to-face teaching), enables data-driven decision-making (to analyse learning outcomes and student performance, for example), 2 and can help streamline administrative processes and management, including automated grading systems, digital student information platforms, 3 online tutoring, and virtual counselling. 4Digital transformation takes advantage of opportunities offered by technological developments and can connect teachers and learners globally through new education models. 5,6Digital learning can also drive skill development to promote digital transformation in other fields. 7Digital transformation plays a crucial role in education; it affects the way teachers teach and students learn and benefits other stakeholders, such as parents and educational administrators.
10] Understanding trends in the applications of digital transformation in education around the world helps in sharing useful experiences and experiments in educational innovation.
The digital transformation process can be investigated using bibliometric analysis to comprehensively evaluate research trends.
Qualitative analysis and evaluation of scientific publications can be employed to assess the development of scientific research as well as to determine its current status in a country. 11,12This method has been used in the field of educational science, for example in lifelong learning 13 and social sciences. 11,14ch research can be used to analyse gaps in the application of digital transformation Any inconsistent information in the collected data was revised; for example, authors from China and Vietnam often do not use the same names in all their publications or their names are rendered differently by the journals that publish them.We used information from the author's Google Scholar site or information available from the ORCID entry to reconcile any such differences in rendering names.The affiliations were standardized using information from the official website of the relevant institution.
We sought to identify the most influential authors (that is, those with the highest number of publications), authors' productivity over time, and networks of collaboration between authors.Research trends were examined by analysing keywords.We extracted from Scopus general information about the data set, information about authors (institution, country, total citations), journals (total citations, CiteScore), and citation counts.The citations were classified by Semantic Scholar (www.semant icsch olar.org) into three categories based on a specific part of the publication that earned a citation, namely background, methods, or results.We used VOSviewer (version 1.6.20)and Biblioshiny (version 4.0) to identify and plot the networks of collaboration between authors and between countries and to identify trends using keywords.
A given publication was recorded as coming from the country shown in the affiliation of the first author or at least of one co-author.
In the keyword trend analysis, keywords that were either irrelevant to research trends, such as 'article', 'student', 'teacher', 'research', or directly linked to the topic in question, such as 'digital transformation', 'digital transformation of education', 'digital transformation in education', and 'education', were excluded.We reviewed all the keywords used by the authors in various forms, ranging from plural nouns to abbreviated words.We selected four keywords for each year to represent the research trends in that year, and each of the keywords was required to appear at least five times to be eligible for this selection. 16

Results
A total of 1329 documents were retrieved from Scopus (586 journal articles and 743 conference papers), published in 637 sources, from 1999 to 2022 (Table 1).These documents had been cited 6856 times in total (a mean of            adaptive learning, and using learner data analysis and artificial intelligence to support teaching and learning, to personalize learning, and to make instant adjustments to learning materials and assessment forms. 26,27me limitations of the research also need to be kept in mind.First, our research was limited to publications covered by Scopus and only in English; books were excluded, which may affect the results of our analysis. 16condly, although we tried to eliminate irrelevant articles, the weeding out might not have been fully optimal, and a few irrelevant publications might have been overlooked.
Thirdly, some elements in the data, such as in education.It also helps to build networks and promote cooperation among scientists around the world for research on the application of digital transformation.In the present paper, we review the literature on digital transformation in education (a) to summarize the common characteristics and research trends in scientific publications, the most influential journals, and the most prolific scholars; (b) to analyse international collaborations in this area; and (c) to identify the most popular research topics.Methods The primary research question was this: What are the characteristics of Scopus-indexed scientific publications on digital transformation in education from 1999 to 2020?We chose the Scopus database (http://www.scopus.com)for this bibliometric analysis because Scopus contains more indexed documents than Web of Science and Dimensions.Scholars and researchers produce a variety of outputs, including journal articles, books, and conference papers.Conference proceedings have value comparable to that of journal articles in some fields such as computer science and are important in some areas of engineering and technology. 15We searched Scopus on 29 January 2023 using the search query 'digital transformation' AND 'education' in abstracts, keywords, and titles of journal articles or conference papers written in English.Only those documents published before 1 January 2023 were considered so as to eliminate the delay between the time of publication of a paper and its inclusion in Scopus.We excluded review studies, bibliometric studies, and books but included book series.Full-text analysis of papers retrieved from the above search enabled us to exclude studies not related to the research topic.This screening was carried out independently by two authors (TTTP and NND), who reached an agreement through consensus.A total of 20 documents were thus removed.

5. 1
citations per document).The h-index of the collected data was 35, that is, 35 items had been cited at least 35 times.The documents were written by a total of 4132 authors (a mean of 3.4 authors per document).One hundred sixty-nine authors had published papers without any co-author, and 177 papers were with one author only, accounting for 13.2% of all the documents that formed the data set.The first article on digital transformation in education, published in 1999 in the Educational Media International, was 'Digital transformation of words in learning processes: a critical view' by H. Saga. 17However, from then on until 2012, digital transformation in education was rarely mentioned in publications.It is only over the past 10 years that the number of publications on digital transformation in education has steadily increased, the most marked rise being in the past 4 years: 123 publications in 2019, 232 in 2020, 380 in 2021, and 467 in 2022 (Figure 1).Overall, the annual growth rate of these digital transformations in education publications between 2013 and 2022 was 30.63%.The total number of citations of these publications increased correspondingly (Figure 1), although 603 of them (45.4%) were not cited at all by any of the papers in our data set.The total of 1329 documents that formed the data set were written by authors from 134 different countries or territories, of which the top 10 in terms of the number of publications are listed inTable 2. The Russian Federation topped the list with 267 publications (20.1% of all publications), nearly twice as many as those from Germany, which ranked second (141 publications).However, the USA ranked first in terms of the number of citations (1315, or 19.2%, with a mean of 15.3 citations per document) followed by the UK (1047, or 15.3%, with a mean of 18.7 per document).

Figure 2
Figure 2 shows the network of international collaboration for research in digital transformation in education.The network consists of 44 countries, each of which features in at least 10 publications and each with authors from two or more countries.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Increase in the number of publications on digital transformation in education and cumulative citations to those publications: 2013-2022.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Network of countries participating in collaborative research on digital transformation in education.Note: The size of the circle is proportional to the number of research publications from that country (Table2).
information management research and practice (355 citations) and the other focused on basic education for younger generations and information management.The article ranked third was a study on digital transformation in German higher education (175 citations); the article reported that both teachers and students use a limited number of digital technologies for predominantly assimilative tasks, with learning management systems being considered the most helpful tool.The authors also proposed strategies

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Top 10 most prolific authors' publication production over time.(Each node (circle) represents one author, and the size of the circle is proportional to the output of that author.The lines between the nodes represent collaboration between the corresponding pair of authors, and the thickness of the line is proportional to the number of collaborative publications jointly authored by them.)

Figure 4 .Table 5 .COVID- 19 :Figure 5 .
Figure 4. Network of authors participating in collaborative research on digital transformation in education.Note: The size of the circle is proportional to the number of research publications from that author (Table4).

Figure 6 .
Figure 6.Research trends in digital transformation of education as ascertained through co-occurrence of keywords in publications on that topic.
author names and affiliations, are not standardized in Scopus, which can skew our findings.Finally, information such as the years of research experience of individual authors and the variety of research topics they worked on cannot be obtained from Scopus.Authors from the developed nations were most highly cited, although authors from Indonesia and Thailand were remarkably productive.Publications on digital transformation in education appear primarily in lower-ranking journals within Scopus.The research landscape of digital transformation in education can be subdivided into four primary domains: the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on digital transformation in higher education, the integration of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies in educational settings, digitization and digital competency in the context of educational transformation, and innovative pedagogical approaches employing technology within higher-education institutions.Our findings offer a global and comprehensive view of digital transformation in education.In particular, the major topics and researchers identified in the present study can help researchers in identifying more promising research directions and can provide funding organizations with an objective basis to allocate funds for research.

Table 3 . Top 10 sources ranked by the output published by them on digital transformation in education Rank Source Type Total publications Total citations CiteScore 2021
a CiteScore yet to be assigned.