Detecting emerging research fronts in education from scientific journals indexed in the Journal Citation Reports: an international perspective

Introduction: This paper identifies emergent fronts of research in education through a study of the best-ranked scientific journals in the area. Methodology: We propose a multivariate methodology that incorporates the most widely used, efficient and representative citation indicators. A descriptive observational evaluative design has been followed with a sample of the 230 journals under the thematic category "Education & Educational Research" 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. Results: Our results show that the journals considered can be classified into five clusters according to their evaluative quality, of which we have considered only the three clusters best configured as representative, which allows inferring up to ten emerging fronts of generic research that show two types of impact: scientific and social. Discussion: It is possible to evaluate scientific journals from the factorial scores generated by a general factor of each journal. A conglomerate analysis allows the classification of journals according to their evaluative quality and inferring from their titles and editorial lines the hottest and most interesting topics, that is, emerging research fronts.