Abstract—E-learning is the electronic version of distance
learning: a planned teaching that presupposes a physical
separation between the teacher and the student. The distance is
either geographic or temporal, and communication can be
asynchronous or synchronous, respectively. E-learning has
been a target of high-quality research for the last two decades.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the scientific production
on e-learning in journals indexed on Elsevier’s Scopus. The
sample was composed by 25330 articles from 2000 to 2019. The
results obtained by bibliometric analysis showed that rates
publication continue to increase. A report was made on the
journals, languages, authors, keywords, organizations and
countries that publish in the field. This analysis was done for all
articles as well as for the most cited articles. The bibliometric
analysis was done for a total of 20 years, as well as for four
5-year periods. This article provides information from the past,
but mostly clues about research on e-learning in the future.
Index Terms—Distance learning, e-learning, bibliometrics,
data analysis.
Sónia Rolland Sobral is with REMIT, Universidade Portucalense,
Portugal (e-mail: sonia@upt.pt).
Cite: Sónia Rolland Sobral, "Two Decades of Research in e-Learning: A Deep Bibliometric Analysis," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 11, no. 9, pp. 398-404, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).