The Academic Anatomy of the Scientific Process Skills Literature

The aim of this study is to examine academic publications on Scientific Process Skills (SPS) indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database and to reveal the structural and content-based anatomy of the related literature. Within the scope of the study, 813 academic publications focused on SPS in the field of education were retrieved from the WoS database and analyzed. The dataset was comprehensively analyzed in terms of epistemic structure, performance metrics, network analysis, conceptual organization, and thematic mapping. In terms of productivity, the distribution of publications over the years and the number of citations were examined, along with the most contributing authors, studies, institutions, and countries. In the context of network analysis, co-citation networks, collaboration networks, keyword and co-occurrence network analysis, as well as emerging topics and thematic evolution were explored. Additionally, conceptual structure and thematic maps based on keywords were also analyzed. In the study, a total of 813 articles published by 2,281 authors representing 69 different countries from 1980 to the present were analyzed. According to the findings, both the number of studies on SPS and the citations to these studies have shown an increasing trend over the years. National Taiwan Normal University emerged as the most productive institution, while the USA and China ranked among the countries making the highest scientific contributions. According to the network analysis results, Kuhn, D., Harlen, W., Pedaste, M., and Osborne, J. are among the most influential authors in the field. Since 2015, topics such as "science education," "scientific literacy," and "inquiry-based learning" have come to the fore, while in recent years, areas like "ChatGPT," "scientific creativity," "systematic review," and "research skills" have attracted increasing attention. In the factor analysis conducted on studies related to SPS, it was found that 33% of the total variance was explained. It is recommended that SPS studies be enriched through integration with various disciplines to offer more meaningful contributions to learning and teaching processes

Anatomy and Medical Technology · Educational Methods and Analysis · Medical and Biological Sciences