Engineering Education Using Serious Games: The Current State, Trends and Future Using a Bibliometric Study

There is a global concern about using serious games in multiple fields with numerous publications, especially in Education. Conducting a bibliometric analysis can be insightful to depict and analyze the current state, trends, and methods most used in serious games for engineering education to provide knowledge upgrades in this research area. Therefore, this bibliometric study used the Web of Science database to select the most relevant documents, VOSviewer and Bibliometrix to conduct the analysis. The results obtained in this bibliometric study highlight that researchers are currently interested in exploiting serious games worldwide. On the one hand, the most advanced countries like USA, England, Germany, and others are the top countries focusing on using games in educational fields. On the other hand, the trend topics related to serious games are indeed applied in the educational engineering area and computer science. Based on the network and thematic map, these two pillars are fundamental and must be developed more. Finally, the top relevant articles reviewed indicate that computer engineering is the most used discipline in serious games. Most of the articles used quantitative or mixed methods as research design. The most used game genres are Simulation, and web-based platforms are reported commonly in serious games in engineering education.