Identical to the previous series of investigations examining the research trends in
science education (Lee et al., 2009; Tsai & Wen, 2005), the present study first collected
all the papers published in IJSE, JRST, and SE from 2008 to 2012 as the preliminary
samples. In these samples, ‘editorial’, ‘commentary’, ‘responses’, and ‘book
review’ papers were then manually excluded. This study analyzed the final sample of
990 research papers.