Bibliometric analysis of academic publication on STEM and its relationship with PISA exam results

This research was conducted to present a bibliographic picture of scientific studies on STEM and to examine its relationship with PISA exam results. In this direction, academic studies on STEM were examined with the bibliometric analysis method, and then the PISA exam results, which measure abilities in the fields of reading, mathematics and scientific literacy, were reviewed. Finally, the relationship between the STEM literature and PISA exam results was examined using the exploratory correlational research method. The data of the study consist of 13695 STEM-themed scientific studies published in WoS and Scopus databases between 1999-2023, and exam results of countries that have not participated in at most one PISA reading, mathematics and scientific literacy exam since 2000. As a result of bibliographic evaluations, common words used in studies on STEM were determined. When examining the co-occurrence network of keywords, it was seen that the most popular words were STEM, STEM education, education, and gender, respectively. The distribution of the STEM subject in the literature over time on the basis of the number of publications and citations has been determined. It is possible that the number of publications increased until 2020, and that the pandemic in 2020 had a negative effect on the number of publications. Collaborations on the basis of countries, institutions and journals are presented with bibliometric visuals. It can be said that the United States of America stands out in the cooperation relations of the publications according to the countries, and Turkish researchers are mostly in cooperation with the researchers from the United States of America. The most significant observation is the significant correlation between the average reading and scientific literacy scores in each PISA cycle and the 2009 publication numbers. Generally positive correlations were found for all countries, especially in terms of reading and scientific literacy, and negative correlations were found for the most successful countries. In terms of contributing to the success of PISA, giving importance to the quality of the studies rather than the number of studies can be an effective strategy. Focusing on less successful countries can offer different perspectives on the subject.