The challenge of discovering the threshold concepts of medical research areas: A bibliometrics-based approach

Abstract

During the last XX century, several changes were applied to traditional educational methods, positioning the student as a central actor in the learning process. One of the pedagogical theories developed was the Threshold Concepts (TC) educational framework, based on education as a space of uncertainty, where the student needs to learn a certain concept or learning experiences that allow developing a new way of thinking. In medical education, written accounts about significant learning experiences, analysis of practice essays and semi-structured focus groups interviews have been applied to identify TC. In that way, our hypothesis is that the use of bibliometrics, as a tool to discover hidden relations between keywords, can overcome traditional difficulties related to TC identification. Keywords are applied to highlight the content of a digital object; they are concepts with a special meaning, similar to TC. Our challenge is to identify the bibliometric indexes that are able to show the relationship between the keywords that make them TC, especially in a medical context. In previous scientific literature, several methods were applied, mainly based on qualitative assessment. In this sense, we propose a quantitative, objective, and reproducible approach that can enrich the learning process from a scientific-based perspective.