Abstract:

This study presents a research method to infer research fronts and trends in Special Education by means of a multivariate methodology that evaluates international journals in Special Education.

A descriptive observational evaluative design has been followed with a sample of 39 journals under the thematic category “Special Education” of JCR 2015. We have used eight evaluative indicators to assess them: impact factor, immediacy index, h index from Web of Science, h index from Scimago, h index from Google Scholar, Scimago Journal Rank, Altmetric scores for three months, and Altmetric scores at any time.

Our results show that the journals considered can be classified into seven clusters according to their evaluative quality, of which we have considered only the three clusters best configured as representative of possibly emerging research fronts. We have also determined a General Factor and a Specific Factor as a combined evaluative indicator or meta-index that represents a plausible evaluation of each journal as a typical or normalized punctuation. We can group journals in accordance to their impact for the research community (General Factorial Score), and with respect to their social impact (Specific Factorial Score).

The method proposed has identified 11 research fronts, 5 of them are in the intersection of the two factors inferred, and consequently there are 5 major fronts that attract both scientific and social interest. These are: General disabilities; General developmental studies; Special disabilities: intelectual, deaf, fluency and dislexia; Disorders studies related to behavior, emotions, autism; and Education-interventions.learning in special children.

Keywords:

Scientific journals, scientific indicators, metaindex, Special Education field, multivariate evaluation, emerging research fronts.