Scientific production on gamification in education: a scientometric analysis

Gamification is an emerging methodology that consists of using games or game mechanics in non-ludic contexts, providing motivation for students in an educational context. This phenomenon has caused it not only to be used in classrooms as concrete experiences but also in the field of science, where there has been a proliferation of research on educational gamification in recent years. This growing interest has led to this study, which consists of a scientometric analysis of the publications indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) impact databases on the emerging methodology of gamification in education. The following categories were surveyed: Education & Educational Research, Education Scientific Disciplines, Social Sciences Interdisciplinary and Psychology Educational. The sample comprised all scientific productions (articles and conference communications) from their first appearance until 2017, for a total of 345 documents. Scientometric analysis focused on analyzing chronological productivity, productivity according to the type of document and according to the publisher, the language and the distribution of productions according to Bradford's and Lotka's laws. The results show that quality scientific production has entered an exponential growth phase, which evinces an increased interest of this methodology in the classroom. The number of productions has declined in the last year, but the scientific quality of these results confirms the importance of gamification in the field. Last, it should be noted that the majority of publications are in English, as it is a global scientific language.