Abstract

The emergence of massive open online course (MOOCs) has been a turning point for the academic world and, especially, in the design and provision of training courses in Higher Education. Now that the first moments of the information explosion have passed, a rigorous analysis of the effect of the movement in high-impact scientific world is needed in order to assess the state of the art and future lines of research. This study analyzes the impact of the MOOC movement in the form of scientific article during the birth and explosion period (2010-2013) in two of the most relevant databases: Journal Citation Reports (WoS) and Scopus (Scimago). We present, through a descriptive and quantitative methodology, the most significant bibliometric data according to citation index and database impact. Furthermore, with the use of a methodology based on social network analysis (SNA), an analysis of the article’s keyword co-occurrence is presented through graphs to determine the fields of study and research. The results show that both the number of articles published and the citations received in both databases present a medium-low significant impact, and the conceptual network of relationships in the abstracts and keywords does not reflect the current analysis developed in general educational media.