Bibliometric data analysis has gained popularity in recent years as an efficient means of visualizing multi-dimensional indicators of influence in communities of practice (Youtie & Shapira, 2008). Such an approach has been used to map emerging fields of research such as synthetic biology and nanotechnology (Shapira, Kwon, & Youtie, 2017; Youtie & Shapira, 2008). Using this approach, one can track citation and social network data over time to develop a deeper understanding of the influence of the CDIO initiative on engineering education publications since its inception (i.e., the past 17 years). In this paper, bibliometric data analysis will be used to examine how publications on the CDIO Initiative have evolved. Visualizations are presented using an open-source visualization tool, VOSViewer, and used to understand geographic distribution and co-authorship. A word frequency and co-occurrence analysis has been used to analyze title and abstract data over the same time period. Geographic author network analysis reveals continued growth in regional collaborations over the past seventeen years. Co-authorship by author name reveals a core community of researchers, which has diverged over time into dispersed collaboration groups. Word co-occurrence analysis of title and abstract data from Scopus reveals that design-implement and project-based learning activities have been the central topic of CDIO-related engineering education literature over this time period. An analysis of the terms “faculty competence” and “learning assessment” indicates that these topics are comparatively under-served in the literature, representing fertile research topics for practitioners. The benefit of this research is to provide insight to past development areas and opportunities for growth in the CDIO Initiative.
