Methodological analysis of CDIO papers

Since 2005, there have been ten annual CDIO conferences. In this article, we analyze the development of the articles from 2005 to 2013. We have found 577 articles from the CDIO website from 2005 to 2013 (in the knowledge library). Out of the 577 papers in the knowledge library, 421 papers were selected for investigation.

We used bibliometric analyses and statistics to inspect the developmental process of the research in the CDIO area. We analyzed the features of the papers including authors, institutions, references, references to other articles presented at CDIO conferences and references from another CDIO article to this one from 2005 to 2013.

We compared the number of papers from the knowledge library with the number of papers shown in the conference programs from the CDIO conferences (except the conference in 2008, because we cannot find the conference program). The number of papers from the CDIO website and the CDIO conference programs are very close in 2005, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. By contrast, the number of papers at the web-site and in the conference proceedings in 2006 and 2009 are quite different. Consequently, for 2006 and 2009, we could not find a sufficient number of papers to perform a statistical analysis.

We categorized the papers used in this study according to the year they were published. Furthermore, we examined the tendency of the development of the CDIO field through the analysis of the above mentioned paper features in each year.

We found the general growth of the number of published papers over time. The papers with multiple authors exceed those with single authors.

Additionally, the number of references in the published papers is relatively high. Moreover, the number of citations from the CDIO conference papers that were cited by the other papers shows a steady growth until 2011, and rapidly reduced from 2012 (Normally, the peak of the citation is shown in the second year of the publication of the paper.).

This result suggests that the website of the CDIO and the CDIO conference provide good platforms for scientific communication. However the interdisciplinary research and collaborations between institutions in the CDIO field need to be further strengthened in the future.