Analytics in Higher Education: Scoping the Landscape of Research in the Area

Understanding the research landscape of any domain is of primary importance at all stages of a concept's evolution. Research in the domain of analytics has increased exponentially in the past decade, analytics is a tool being applied to increase effectiveness and efficiency within all domains. Similarly, there are numerous research studies that have applied analytics to the domain of higher education. Assessing research activity is important for planning future research and identifying the way forward to make meaningful contributions. The objective of this paper is to examine the current research in this domain and to identify emerging areas of research to make meaningful contributions. Bibliometric analysis was applied using Scopus. Documents on analytics and higher education keywords in business, accounting and management and published in journals were considered for the analysis. Vos Viewer was used for bibliometric analysis in the area, to identify emerging research themes and to understand the scope of applying analytics in higher education. The search query found 1635 documents when using the keywords of “analytics” and “higher education”. This was further narrowed down to research in Business Management and Accounting and using Journal articles and conference articles, finally yielding 103 articles. After a primary read to remove articles misplaced in the group the final number of articles include for the bibliometric analysis came down to 98. There has been an increase in publications since 2018 with interest increasing post pandemic in the area. The research categories are Student outcomes and perspective, academician outcomes and perspective, design of learning systems, etc. Based on this, it is recommended that research should focus on theoretical aspects of applying analytics to HEIs, ethical issues in data collection, etc..