Research on the application of ICT in Mathematics education: Bibliometric analysis of scientific bibliography from the Scopus database

Abstract Attention to technology integration in teaching and learning has created a big change in the education landscape. There is no limit to the application of information technology in education in general and in mathematics education in particular. Although there have been many studies on the opportunities and applications of ICT in Mathematics education in the world, many aspects remain unexplored. In this study, the authors apply bibliometric analysis for the purpose of evaluating the scientific results of publications involving in the use of ICT in Mathematics education, which were indexed in the Scopus database. 205 publications were cited to analyze growth trends, contributions of authors, research institutions, co-authors in the research field and the development of research direction. The analysis results show that publications that mainly appear in recent years are published on sources with low citation index; Indonesia, Malaysia and Australia are the most influential countries in studies on this topic; Research cooperation in this field is not strong; The main research topics and trends are online teaching, realistic mathematics education, and computer-aided teaching. From the research results obtained, the authors also furnish some recommendations in the article for future research in this field.


Introduction
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is considered a powerful tool for educational change and reform (Fu, 2013;Goktas et al., 2009). Several previous studies have shown that the appropriate use of ICT can raise educational quality and connect learning to real-life situations (Lowther et al., 2008;Van Weert & Tatnall, 2005). ICT assists in transforming a teaching environment into a learner-centered one (Sanchez & Education, 2011), learners are actively involved in the learning processes in ICT classrooms, and they are authorized by the teacher to make decisions, plans, and so forth (Lu et al., 2010).
In mathematics education, ICT also provides teachers with foundational tools and means to help teachers change teaching methods, support students in independent learning, and actively participate in the discovery of concepts and mathematics topics. As a result, students gain a deeper understanding of mathematical ideas. Therefore, it can be understood that the integration of ICT in mathematics education is the result of the ability to apply ICT to help students achieve better in mathematics. These potentials of ICT make classroom integration a promising practice, but its success depends on various factors. Research on the use of ICT in mathematics education is also one of the ways to increase the effectiveness and feasibility of the applications of ICT in mathematics education.
Scientometrics or bibliometrics is a relatively new branch of science concerned with the quantitative evaluation of science in publications. Scientific quantification is considered an objective method for measuring the quality and influence of scientific publications.
Quantitative analysis and evaluation of scientific publications or scientometrics provides quantitative information about scientific publications and citations. This information can help scientists have their research orientation or units, organizations and governments have a basis for allocating research funding (Waltnam & Noyons, 2018). Furthermore, university ranking organizations evaluate universities using simple scientometric research-output metrics (Charlton & Andras, 2007). It can also be used to evaluate the development of scientific research in a country and understand its current position (Ha et al., 2020;Pham-Duc et al., 2020).
In this article, the authors' objective is to use bibliometrics of scientific publications on the application of ICT in Mathematics education indexed in the Scopus database in the past time. The three main objectives include (a) a summary of the general characteristics and trends of scientific publications, the most important source journals, and the most effective scholars; (b) an analysis of international cooperation among countries in this field; and (c) citation of the most popular research topics and trends based on word analysis of titles, abstracts, and keywords.
During the research design step, the main research question identified was: What is bibliometric information of scientific publications on the application of ICT in Mathematics education indexed in the Scopus database in the past time?
The data collection step is divided into three sub-steps: data collection, data filtering, and data cleaning Step 1: Data collection. There are five main bibliographic databases that can be used to conduct a bibliometrics analysis, including: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic và Dimentions (Moral-Muñoz et al., 2020). Among them, WoS and Scopus are most used for biometric analytics. In this study, we decided to use the Scopus database as a search engine because it has a larger number of indexed documents than other databases (Ha et al., 2020;Mongeon & Paul-Hus, 2016;Pham-Duc et al., 2020) published before 2021 because the fact that the publications indexed in the Scopus database have a certain lag compared to the time such publications are published, resulting in the publications published in 2021 may not have been fully and timely updated. Query data was made from the Scopus database on 15 August 2021. As a result, 243 documents were obtained.
Step 2: Data filtering. The authors conduct data filtering by censoring titles, abstracts and keywords to remove documents that are not directly related to the research problem. The number of documents remaining is 205.
Step 3: Data cleaning. The downloaded data needs to be cleaned because the quality of the analysis is highly dependent on the quality of the input data (Ha et al., 2020). We have corrected some inconsistent information in the data collected such as: Author's name, author's workplace, etc.
Data analysis and data visualization: Various analytic techniques have been applied to extract the information of the set of publications. The general information of the publication collection has been summarized, and the annual number of publications is analyzed to derive the development trends of research field. Each country's contribution based on the number of articles and citations was analyzed to determine what worked best . . . The authors used Scopus's available tools, VOSViewer and Biblioshiny softwares to conduct the data analysis.

General information and research trends
The main information about the dataset of the article is shown in Tables 1 and 2. The total number of publications in the collection is 205, published in 139 different sources (scientific journals, books, book chapters, etc.) during the period from 1999 to 2020. Most of them are scientific articles (89 articles) and proceedings of scientific conferences (80 articles). The total number of citations recorded at the time of the study was 800, or 3.9 citations per document. This is a small number, compared to other fields of research.
The h-index of this collection is 14, which means that out of the 205 publications under study, 14 are cited at least 14 times. A total of 458 authors have participated in research and publication in this field (an average of 2.23 authors/publication). In which, the total number of authors publishing their research is 36, these authors have published 43 scientific publications with a single author, accounting for 21.0% of the total publications. This is quite a high rate when compared to other studies in the field of educational sciences.
Research authors in this field tend to publish a lot in scientific conferences (accounting for 39.02% of the total publications). In social science, the percentage of conference posts accounts for only about 6% of the publications indexed in the Scopus database (according to data from https://www.scopus.com). When comparing the quality of various types of documents through the number of citations, it can be seen that scientific articles have the highest quality with an average number of citations of 5.83 citations/document, followed by reviews with 4.75 citations/document. Meanwhile, the numbers for conference posts and book chapters are 2.59 and 2.36, respectively.
The total publications published annually and the cumulative total citations of the studies on the application of ICT in Mathematics education are shown in Figure 1. The annual growth rate of the publications in this field is 19.1%, however, the growth rate is uneven between the years. Scientists have been interested in research on this topic mainly in the past 10 years, but the number of publications is still small. The number of citations by publications has increased, but not by much.

Distribution by country/territory
According to Scopus's data, the authors from 62 countries/regions participated in research on this topic. Information on countries with total publications of five or more publications is shown in Table 3. The number of publications per country is recorded when at least one author in the publication adds the name of the agency with its address in that country. The country that contributes the most publications in this field is Indonesia with 27 published studies (accounting for 13.2% of the total publications) with 85 citations (accounting for 10.6% of the total citations). Second on this list is also a country from Southeast Asia, Malaysia with 16 publications published, followed by Australia with 15 publications. Other countries in this list with published publications are Greece (13), the UK (12), the Czech Republic (11), South Africa (10), Italy (9), Slovakia (9), Spain (7), Israel (7), Germany (6), Mexico (5), Russian Federation (5), USA (5).
Regarding assessment on the overall quality of publications from the countries by the average number of citations, the publications by the authors from Mexico have the highest average number of citations with 6.2 citations/publication, followed by Italy (6.0 citations/publication), Australia (5.5 citations/publication), UK (4.7 citations/publication). Thus, it can be seen that the strong countries in educational science research such as the US, Canada, and China are not the authors with the most publications in this field.
The network of international cooperation between countries in the application of ICT in Mathematics education is shown in Figure 2. The network is built with countries that have cooperated with other countries for at least 1 published publication. The size of each node represents the total publications published, and the thickness of the link between the nodes represents the degree of cooperation between the two countries. Countries that often cooperate with each other are classified into clusters of similar colors.
The authors from 33 countries have collaborated with other countries. The most significant cooperation is among countries such as Indonesia and China, UK and Canada, South Africa and Germany, Ireland and Greece. In general, although international cooperation between countries has been recognized, research cooperation in this field is not strong. The author from Malaysia has 16 published publications, but only 1 has recognized international cooperation. The two countries with the most publications on this topic are in Southeast Asia, but there is no research collaboration.

The most published sources
The authors' research on this topic has been published in 139 other sources, including 91 scientific journals, 72 conference proceedings, 23 books and 19 volumes. A list of the most published sources (with at least 3 publications) is shown in Table 4.
The most published Sources are from the Journal of Physics Conference Series with 16 publications, followed by Education and Information Technologies and Proceedings of The European Conference on E-Learning ECEL with 6 publications. The next 5 positions have announced 5 publications; The last 3 positions published 3 publications in this field. In general, the published sources in this list have low CiteScore, except for the New ICMI Study Series (1.50) and ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (1.20), the rest of the sources have CiteScore less than 1.0. Among the 6 scientific journals in Table 4, only 1 journal is ranked Q1 (Education and Information Technologies), 1 journal is ranked Q2 (Eurasia Journal of Mathematics Science and Technology Education), the remaining 4 journals are ranked Q4 in the Scopus database.

The most contributing author
There have been 458 authors participating in research and publication on the field of ICT application in Mathematics education, the list of 8 authors with 3 published publications and more are shown in Table 5 The network of research collaborations between authors on at least 2 published publications is shown in Figure 3. In this network, most of the authors can be seen in Table 5. Overall, Similar to the cooperation between countries, the network of cooperation between authors in this research  field is not strong, mainly cooperation between small groups. Author Zaranis, N. although there are 6 publications on this topic, half of these publications that are published are the results of this author's research (Zaranis, 2016(Zaranis, , 2018(Zaranis, , 2014, the remaining 3 publications are the results of this author's research with three different authors. Novotná, J. mainly collaborated with the other two authors, Jančařík, A. and Moraová, H (eg (Moraová & Novotná, 2018;Novotná & Jančařík, 2018)). Two authors Daher, W., and Baya'a, N. collaborated and published all 3 studies on this topic (Baya'a & Daher, 2013, 2012Daher & Baya'a, 2010), the same goes for Doukakis and Chionidou-   Moskofoglou, however, these two authors collaborated with several other authors (Doukakis et al., 2010a(Doukakis et al., , 2010b.

The most influential studies
Information about the most influential studies in this field is shown in Table 6.
These are the publications with the highest total citations among all publications on the application of ICT in Mathematics education. The article with the highest total citations (48 citations recorded) is from two authors, De Witte K., and Rogge N. on the effectiveness and efficiency of ICT for Mathematics education published in Computers and Education (ranked 4/1319 in the field of Education by Scopus) in 2014. The author of the article suggests that a correction for characteristics related to the student population, teaching staff, administrative personnel, and school management is warranted in the evaluation of the impact of ICT (De Witte & Rogge, 2014). With 47 citations, the article by Trouche L. and Drijvers P. on Handheld Technology for Mathematics Education was published in ZDM-International Journal on Mathematics Education (ranked 177/1319 in the field of Education of Scopus) is the second on this list (Trouche & Drijvers, 2010). In the third position in terms of citations is a study on the use of ICT in mathematics teaching in Ghana by Agyei D.D. and Voogt J. in Education and Information Technologies (ranked 72/1319 in the field of Education of Scopus; Agyei & Voogt, 2011). Some other topics that are also of interest to researchers are Mathematics and ICT: a framework for conceptualizing secondary school mathematics teachers' classroom practices (Crisan et al., 2007); Towards a pedagogical model of teaching with ICTs for mathematics attainment in primary school (Hardman, 2019); Teaching and Learning using Mathematics Software (Dockendorff & Solar, 2018;Kilicman et al., 2010;Lowrie, 2002)

Keyword analysis and research terms
Out of 205 published publications, the authors suggested 494 keywords in their publications, when indexing in the database, Scopus added some keywords for classification. We conducted an analysis of these keywords to identify the main research directions of the scholars. Keywords that are not related to research trends such as article, student, teacher, research, etc. or keywords related to this field of research being carried out such as ICT, Mathematics Education, Learning  Figure 4. Highly related keywords are grouped with similar colors, and the links between keywords represent the times those keywords appear together in the publications, the size of the keyword buttons represents the number of times the keywords appear in the publications.
Analyzing the occurrence of keywords in research and using ICT in mathematics education can see that the authors are interested in many different research directions, and the research trend with the most attention is E-Learning in Mathematics education (appearing in 20 studiesaccounting for 9.8%) in this direction. There are some prominent keywords are engineering education, mathematical techniques, curricula, personnel training, etc.; The second keyword group is the research direction of Realistic Mathematics Education, geometry, teaching method, kindergarten, etc.; The third keyword group is related to the keywords such as Computer-Aided Instruction, Integration, etc. The last group is less prominent including the main keywords: Learning Systems, Learning Models, etc.

Conclusion
In this study, the authors use the bibliometric analysis method to analyze research trends, and the development of publications related to the application of ICT in Mathematics Education, which is indexed in the Scopus database. The authors used a 5-step process developed by Börner et al., 2005) and Zupic and Čater (2015) proposed to conduct the study.
The main findings of this study are: 1) Although this is a potential research direction, the number of studies on this topic is small. There were 205 studies published between 1999 and 2000 in scientific journals, conference proceedings, books, and volumes. Publications have mainly appeared in recent years, especially in 2019 and 2020. The studies in this field tend to be published in scientific journals and conference proceedings. 2) The studies on this topic have not received due attention, the average number of citations is not large, and the publications are mostly published on sources with low citation index; Scholars working on this topic tend to cite journal articles more often than other sources. 3) Indonesia, Malaysia, and Australia are the most influential countries in research on this topic. This research topic is not interested in studying by scientists from countries that are strong in educational science research such as the US, Canada, Netherland, and the UK (Huang et al., 2019). This result is not similar to the studies on the application of IT in physics education, according to which the countries with many publications on the integration of ICT to physical education are: China, the USA, Spain, the UK, and Ukraine (Cabrera, 2020;Sospedra Harding et al., 2021). International cooperation in general and cooperation among authors in research in this field is not strong, mainly cooperation in small and intermittent groups. 4) Some of the main research directions on this topic are E-learning, realistic mathematics education, and Computer-aided teaching.
Research direction on the application of ICT in Mathematics education is a great potential and importance. However, the number of studies on this topic is still modest. Education researchers interested in the field can refer to the key research trends and impactful articles mentioned above. Scholars also need to strengthen international cooperation further to improve the quality of research in the coming time.