Trends and issues in multimedia learning research in 1996–2016: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract Parallel to the recent advancements in information and communications technologies, research on multimedia learning has generated a number of theories and empirical findings. Numerous trends and issues have emerged, showing the complex and dynamic nature of multimedia learning and the associated scholarship. To provide a comprehensive knowledge map and an overview of recent research on multimedia learning, 411 peer-reviewed articles from 1996 to 2016 were analyzed to describe the empirical work in multimedia learning. A bibliometric approach was applied to reveal the most common keywords and terms and their interactions via co-word analysis. The results showed that cognitive load is the highest co-occurred keyword and that animation provided the highest number of co-occurrence relationships with other keywords in our sample. Five clusters of research trends were identified: theoretical foundations of multimedia learning, representations and principles, instructional design and individual differences, motivation and metacognition, and video and hypermedia. Despite the high co-occurrence of the terms “memory”, “working memory”, and “cognitive load”, only a few studies examined the role of individual differences in cognition such as working memory capacity in multimedia learning. The multimedia learning principles most commonly discussed in the last two decades of research are redundancy, contiguity, and coherence. Thus, more research should be conducted to empirically test the many other principles recently discussed in the Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning and address the issue of individual differences in attention and cognition during learning with multimedia.