The present study seeks to map and visualize up-to-date perspectives of the topic of active learning by analyzing and interpreting the different elements that make up learning ecosystems within the European Higher Education Area. With this aim, scientometric methods were employed to analyze a sample of 474 articles recovered from Web of Science (WoS) during the three-year period between 2018 and 2020. All articles examined the topic of active learning. Keywords (authors’ keywords and ‘keywords plus’) from the manuscripts were examined through co-occurrence analysis in order to establish the conceptual structure of active learning. Among the different trends and emerging topics identified, there is an important presence of topics related to technology applied to the field of education, where digital contexts acquire a preponderant role in current education. These innovative changes focused on the digital updating and exploitation of technology represent a methodological challenge that requires an involvement and commitment to this new space for educational practice by teachers and students.

Este estudio pretende realizar una evaluación bibliométrica a través de indicadores de calidad metodológica de la producción científica publicada durante el trienio de 2014 a 2016 en las siete revistas españolas de educación indexadas en el Journal Citation Reports (JCR): Revista de Psicodidáctica; Comunicar; Revista de Educación; Educación XX1; Enseñanza de las Ciencias; Revista Española de Pedagogía; y Porta Linguarum. A través de una metodología bibliométrica-descriptiva se analiza cuantitativamente una muestra de artículos que asciende a 479 y seleccionados a través de un muestreo no probabilístico de tipo deliberado. Globalmente, los resultados obtenidos apuntan a que las revistas evaluadas han logrado niveles de cumplimiento de los indicadores metodológicos propuestos bastante altos que manifiestan la excelente calidad metodológica que atesoran dichas publicaciones, aunque mejor en unas revistas que en otras y sin menoscabo para que también se hayan detectado indicadores metodológicos mejorables. Dichos indicadores están relacionados, sobre todo, con la no explicitación de las tipologías de abordaje metodológico, del muestreo utilizado, así como de los criterios de calidad cuantitativos (fiabilidad y validez) y de naturaleza cualitativa. Finalmente, destacar que hay evidencias empíricas que apoyan que cuanto mejor considerada es una revista en JCR también es acreedora de una mejor calidad metodológica.

This research aims to establish the importance of the different indicators of a methodological-analytical nature included in the research reports presented in scientific articles. Thus, our interest is focused on determining which of these indicators are the best predictors for establishing a scientific article profile with a higher or lower degree of concreteness. For this purpose, we selected all the scientific articles published in the seven Spanish journals within the field of educational research indexed in the Journal Citation Report (JCR) database during 2016. More precisely, we selected a total of 479 papers published during the three-year period 2014-2016. Each journal obtained an overall score depending on the presence vs absence of such methodological indicators. Following the implementation of the Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detection technique, where this variable, transformed into a new fictitious variable grouped into three levels, has been taken as a variable criterion, and, as predictors, the ten methodological-analytical indicators, it has been found that, in fact, some methodological-analytical indicators play a more important role than others in the concreteness of the research designs raised in the research work. In this way, we are able to determine how these indicators related to the quality criteria are (QUC); the type of sampling-s considered (ST3); and the study methodology (ME), which have been decisive for the establishment of more complete methodological-analytical designs. La presente investigación pretende establecer la importancia que juegan los diferentes indicadores de naturaleza metodológico-analítica incluidos en los informes de investigación presentados en los artículos científicos. Así pues, nuestro interés se centra en determinar cuáles de dichos indicadores son los mejores predictores para establecer un perfil de artículo científico con un mayor o menor grado de concreción. Para este fin, seleccionamos todos los artículos científicos publicados en las siete revistas españolas del ámbito de la investigación educativa indexadas en la base de datos Journal Citation Report (JCR) durante el año 2016. Exactamente seleccionamos un total de 479 trabajos publicados durante el trienio 2014-2016. Cada una de las revistas obtuvo una puntuación general dependiendo de la presencia vs ausencia de dichos indicadores metodológicos. Tras la implementación de la técnica de Árboles de Decisión, donde se ha tomado como variable criterio dicha variable transformada en una nueva variable ficticia agrupada en tres niveles y como predictores los diez indicadores metodológico-analíticos hemos comprobado que, efectivamente, algunos de estos indicadores juegan un papel más importante que otros en la concreción de los diseños de investigación planteados en los trabajos objeto de investigación. De esta forma, apreciamos como son los indicadores relativos a los criterios de rigor metodológico (CA1); tipo de muestreo-s considerado-s (MU3); y la metodología de abordaje del estudio (ME) los que han resultado determinantes para el establecimiento de diseños metodológico-analítico más completos.

Information and communication technologies can be a tool for the development of social and educational values that provide young people with social difficulties with the necessary opportunities for their insertion in contemporary society. In this perspective, a work is proposed whose objective is to investigate the digital leisure experiences of young people in social difficulties to discover the educational opportunities that can be implemented in the group through leisure activities sustained in the technological environment. This is a qualitative study, with open data interviews conducted with 78 informants as data collection instruments. Among the relevant results obtained is that this group of young people in a situation of social exclusion remains in constant contact with friends through their smartphones. With the continued use of this device, they alternate their professional, family and educational occupations with social networks and the Internet to search, among other actions, information about celebrities or fashion "youtubers" to copy their personal behavior and style. Therefore, we conclude with the analysis of an educational approach that uses these devices as a means of working with young people in social difficulty, educational alternatives for digital leisure that provide opportunities for the development of actions on the network, whose value for personal and social growth enables new opportunities for inclusion in society.

Using a quantitative–bibliometric methodology, this study attempted to locate from which perspectives the study of religiosity is being approached in the scientific world, in order to achieve traceability for recent research using the following keywords—religiosity, gender, age, ethnicity and social life—locating possible future directions as well as fields of study yet to be discovered, and studying the evolution of scientific research on religiosity in the social sciences in the last 25 years. According to the results obtained in the Scopus database from the literature on concepts such as family, culture, spirituality, identity, marriage and sexuality, we discovered that the research revolved around six main components: education, mental health, attitudes, psychological aspects, religion and gender.

This study seeks to explore the different knowledge structures in the sphere of educational research into COVID-19 during 2020. Using bibliometric methods, analysis was performed of a sample of 308 scientific articles retrieved from the Web of Science database. Using different data analysis techniques combining co-occurrence analysis, co-citation analysis and factorial analysis, All Keywords and Keywords Plus were used to achieve the main research objective: identification of the main themes and trends of production in the sphere of educational research into COVID-19. The main findings of this study in terms of the conceptual structure show that analysis of the centrality and density of the thematic trends points to a generalised structural change in the entire educational system towards methodological teaching–learning procedures oriented towards distance education. As for the intellectual structure, among the host of authors and sources of information involved only a select few have a greater influence on the scientific community. Finally, in terms of social structure, there is limited collaboration between authors and institutions from different countries. However, this collaboration is more intense within countries themselves and in terms of their own production, with the USA being the country with the strongest links.