STEM education research goes global as journal’s impact and reach hit record highs

The International Journal of STEM Education, founded in 2014 to push scholarship beyond single science disciplines, has released a twelve-year retrospective showing that STEM education has matured into a distinct and genuinely global field of research. The editorial, published by founding editor Yeping Li in October 2026, tracks the journal’s citation performance, readership, authorship, and topic trends, and finds record-high impact metrics alongside a striking shift in who leads the field’s most influential work.

The journal’s citation indicators have climbed steadily since it received its first Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate Analytics in 2019. In 2025 the journal reached record highs of 10.7 for the two-year Impact Factor and 11.4 for the five-year Impact Factor, while its Journal Citation Indicator rose to a record 3.01. In Clarivate’s category Education and Educational Research, the journal ranked 8th of 760 journals by Impact Factor in 2025, holding the 99th percentile, and its Journal Citation Indicator percentile edged up from 98.36 to 98.49. In the Science Citation Index Expanded category Education, Scientific Disciplines, its Impact Factor percentile rose from 97.1 in 2024 to 98.3 in 2025, moving it to 2nd of 89 journals.

Elsevier’s Scopus database, which has indexed the journal since 2018, tells the same story. In 2025 the journal posted record values of 19.8 for CiteScore, 4.878 for the Source Normalized Impact per Paper, and 3.316 for the SCImago Journal Rank, and it has remained in Quartile 1 continuously since 2019. The editorial notes that these indicators reflect not only growing visibility of the journal’s publications but also mounting international engagement in STEM education research, consolidating the journal’s position in the international scholarly landscape.

Usage data add a complementary measure of reach. Full-text article requests grew from roughly 656,500 in 2020 to 1.18 million in 2021, 1.4 million in 2022, 1.77 million in 2023, 1.79 million in 2024, and a record 1.95 million in 2025, an increase of about 200 percent over five years. Early 2026 figures point to continued growth: by August 31, 2026, more than 1.457 million requests had been recorded, with January 2026 up 53.6 percent over January 2025. Interestingly, the editorial observes that readership growth has been more modest than citation growth in recent years, suggesting that article usage and citation impact do not necessarily move in parallel.

The journal’s most-cited articles reveal where the field’s intellectual energy now lies. Among the ten most-cited articles published in 2023 and 2024, six concern educational technologies, four focus specifically on artificial intelligence in education, and two address computational thinking, alongside work on educational robotics and games. The eight 2023 articles averaged 50.6 citations in 2025, while the two 2024 articles, both on educational technologies, averaged 38.5 citations despite shorter exposure. Four of the eight 2023 articles had also appeared on the previous year’s most-cited list, with AI-focused pieces showing particularly strong citation growth.

Authorship patterns among these high-impact papers mark a clear departure from the journal’s earlier years. For the second consecutive year, the ten most-cited articles were dominated by corresponding authors based outside the United States; only one article in the 2025 list had a US-based corresponding author. Earlier reviews had documented a much larger share of US-based researchers among the journal’s most-cited work, and similar shifts have appeared in other major journals in the field, suggesting that scholarly leadership in STEM education research is becoming increasingly distributed across the global research community.

Reader data paint a picture of extraordinary geographic breadth. The journal recorded article accesses from approximately 230 countries and regions in each of the three periods examined, including some of the world’s smallest and most remote locations such as Chad, Djibouti, the Falkland Islands, the Faroe Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The United States remained a major source of accesses, rising from 410,529 in 2024 to 494,789 in 2025, but Asia led as a continent, with six Asian countries or regions, including the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Singapore, and India, appearing among the top ten in every period and collectively accounting for 54.7 percent of top-ten accesses in 2025. No African or South American country entered the top ten.

Authorship data reveal two simultaneous trends. The United States has consistently led publication output since 2019, and China first entered the top five contributors in 2020, ranking second behind the United States since 2021, with leading contributors concentrated among a small group that includes Taiwan, Germany, England, and Australia. At the same time, the total number of contributing countries and regions climbed steadily, from 18 in the 2017-2019 window to 38 in 2023-2025, indicating broadening international participation even as major output concentrates in a handful of research powerhouses. The journal’s inaugural 2014 volume, with 13 articles from five countries and eight US-based corresponding authors, illustrates how far the field has traveled.

Topic trends have evolved in parallel. In the journal’s first five years, 45.1 percent of its 144 articles addressed policy, curriculum, and assessment in STEM education and reform, and roughly 75 percent of contributions came from US-based researchers. A shift toward postsecondary STEM education emerged from 2017, and since 2021 the journal has published increasing numbers of articles with corresponding authors from disciplines beyond education, including biology, engineering, physics, and psychology. A recent review of the journal’s 2014-2023 output found equity had become the most frequently studied area, especially from 2020 to 2023, followed by integration, science, and higher education, with the most frequent international collaborations occurring between the United States and mainland China.

The growth of publication outlets underscores the field’s institutionalization. A recent review identified at least 34 publication outlets directly related to STEM education, including 21 English-language journals with at least ten scholarly publications in the past year. Only four of these predate 2016, and 17 have launched within the past decade, 12 of them in or after 2020. Among the 21 English-language journals explicitly focused on STEM education, the International Journal of STEM Education remains the only one indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index. The editorial concludes that the internationalization has been evolutionary rather than a complete departure from the field’s historically US-centered development, and that the journal will continue publishing article collections on emerging topics such as AI’s impact on assessment and STEM education as it works to connect diverse scholarly communities worldwide.

Subject of Research: Internationalization and scholarly performance of STEM education research as tracked through the International Journal of STEM Education

Article Title: Internationalizing STEM education as a distinct and globally established field of scholarship

Article References: Li, Y. (2026). Internationalizing STEM education as a distinct and globally established field of scholarship. International Journal of STEM Education, 13(1), Article 65. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-026-00654-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40594-026-00654-7

Keywords: STEM education, International Journal of STEM Education, internationalization, journal impact factor, artificial intelligence in education, educational technology, computational thinking, citation metrics, global readership, scholarly publishing, equity in STEM, higher education