STEM education has become important in many countries around the world. STEM education can begin while students are very young. However, earlier research has shown that one of the most important factors influencing the decision on scientific research selection is the middle school science classes. In this research, we extract database from Scopus to evaluate the scientific results of publications in the field of STEM education in middle school in the period 2000–2020. A data set of 272 academic papers was indexed to monitor the development of this field by Scopus. The results of the quantitative analysis showed that researches on STEM education in middle schools have boomed in the last 5 years, mainly in the USA. The trend of research collaboration in the field of STEM education in middle schools is not strong. The research topics are quite diverse, focusing on a number of issues: gender, engineering education, curriculum, etc. This study has some limitations, including that only data from the Scopus database were selected and manually filtered, so our analyses totally depended on the quality of the input information imported from the Scopus database.

In response to the long-term challenges of skills shortages and mismatches, many countries worldwide have made significant investments in STEM education. However, to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the progress of global research on the implementation of STEM education, it is essential to compile case studies on STEM education. Therefore, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of 750 publications from Scopus database to assess the bibliographic content of case studies on STEM education from 2006 to 2022. Our main findings show that the first case study on STEM education dates back to 2006, and research in this direction has grown enormously and continuously over the last five years (counting for 72.9%). The most influential articles in the field are cited mainly in the background citations section and help provide an initial perspective for readers to understand the insights discussed later in the study. The most popular journals publishing case studies in STEM education are of good quality, ranking highly in Scopus and Web of Science categories. The analysis results show three main research directions: STEM education in higher education, STEM education expands to STEAM, and STEM education activities in K12-education.