Bibliometric and Visual Insights Into Higher Education Informatization: A Systematic Review of Research Output, Collaboration, Scope, and Hot Topics

Data Sources and Screening

We used the Web of Science (core collection) as our main data source, as it ensures the comprehensiveness and reliability of the data analyzed. The indices selected were SSCI and SCI-Expanded. Our search strategy incorporated the following terms:

TS=((“Higher Education” OR “College” OR “University”) AND (“Informatization” OR “Office Automation”) AND (“E-Learning” OR “Mobile Learning”) OR (“Administration” OR “Management” OR “Supervision”))

The search covered the period from January 1, 2000 to December 1, 2023, yielding a total of 2,950,001 literature records. Next, we refined our search by selecting ‘Article’ as the document type, which yielded 2,336,821 articles. Further refinement was achieved by screening the Web of Science categories and Citation Topics, leading to a selection of 2,355 articles.

However, the data obtained directly from the search formula may contain duplications or inconsistencies with the topic (Martín-Martín et al., 2018). Therefore, we performed a pre-processing step before the analysis, which involved a manual review of each article’s content (including the title and abstract) to eliminate redundant and irrelevant publications, ensuring that the selected articles were indeed related to higher education informatization research. After this rigorous screening process, we retained 199 articles for content and bibliometric mapping analysis (see Figure 1).