Over the years CDIO have developed from a small community where everyone knew each other to a community with over 100 members. With the CDIO focus on sharing ideas and generally inspiring each other, the growth puts even more focus on the conferences for face-to-face meetings and the knowledge library for inspiration during the meetings.
In other engineering societies there is a growing interest in becoming more scholarly. One example is SEFI, where Wankat, Williams and Neto (2013) evaluated the evaluation of the two journals (European Journal of Engineering Education and Journal of Engineering Education) associated with SEFI. The focused on author data, citation data and reference data. They concluded “Both journal followed similar trends. They progressed from opinion essays, reports and descriptive articles to research articles”. Others (Malmi et al., 2013) have investigated the more research oriented papers at the SEFI conferences.
Within the CDIO community, the question has also been discussed. Rick Sellers wrote in an email to the CDIO-leaders mail list in 2012: “… many of the papers don't meet the criteria for scholarly work. They are short on review of the literature, measurements and analysis to support useful conclusions, even while many of them succeed in painting pictures of how different institutions are implementing CDIO program elements”. One response to this problem is the different categories of articles for the 2014 conference: Advances of CDIO, CDIO Learning Objects and CDIO Implementation, where the first category requires a scholarly approach and the other two are focused on helping others with implementation of CDIO in their own institution.
This article investigates the articles in the knowledge library (that is the articles presented at the annual CDIO world conferences) available at www.cdio.org. It has the same focus as the article by Wankat et al (2013), namely author, citation, reference and collaboration data and analyses trends in these different categories.
The number of articles in this investigation is 510. Of those, it was not possible to find the related conference for 60. From Figure 1 (graph of number of articles each year) , showing the number of articles for each year, we can see that there have been changes in the number of articles, but in general a growing number until 2011. In 2012 and 2013, we can observe a drop in the number of articles. The reason for the 2013 number might be that the knowledge library is not updated due to the movement of the webserver from MIT to Chalmers.
As written before, this article looks at development in the articles over the 12 years. References Malmi, L., de Graaff, E., Adawi, T., Curmi, R., Duffy, G., Kautz, C., . . . Williams, B. (2013). Methodological analysis of SEFI EER papers. Proceedings of the 41st SEFI Conference, Leuven. Belgium. Wankat, P., Williams, B., & Neto, P. (2013). Past, present and future of engineering education. Conference Proceedings: Keynote Lectures and Abstracts, Leuven, Belgium. 46-55.
Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014