Scientometrics, Data Science and Teaching Innovations in Economics. Reality or Utopia?

Teaching innovation is defined as “the implementation of new ideas, methods, strategies, and technologies in the teaching and learning process with the aim of improving educational quality”. It aims not only to adapt to changes in society and technology but also to prepare students for their professional future. This work aims to extract, through the use of scientometrics, data science, social network analysis, and data scraping (more commonly known as web scraping), information from a community on the Reddit platform, to learn and understand the opinions and concerns of university students. This is to provide recommendations for developing a strategy for teaching improvement in universities, planning and developing teaching, or in the evaluation itself. It can be observed that the most studied topics on teaching innovation in Economics focus on new educational approaches; there is a trend towards the new era of data and information; behavior and mindset are also significant themes; together with topics related to economics and types of business. Additionally, there is a growing emphasis on societal transfer and sustainability. For its part, co-occurrence maps reveal a trend towards the study of concepts related to methodologies and teaching processes, more geared towards innovation from an educational reform perspective; the rise of big data, artificial intelligence, data analysis, the new era of knowledge, and new trends in thinking. After processing and analyzing the obtained data, sentiment analysis, word clouds and a network analysis based on bigrams are proposed to analyze a particular forum on the social network Reddit and gather information from it. Some preliminary results indicate a marked positive sentiment in the graduate studies community, identifying words such as time, research, help, thought, life, and sleep, among others. Higher education is a source of knowledge and personal satisfaction, but it can also give rise to all kinds of mental afflictions, such as depression or anxiety.