2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background: Over the past decade, both engineering education and STEM education have expanded rapidly worldwide. However, most prior studies have examined each field independently, and the connections between these two domains remain underexplored. Understanding cross-domain collaboration structures is essential for advancing interdisciplinary integration and sustaining innovation in education research.

Purpose: This study examines global collaboration patterns between engineering education and STEM education through a network perspective. The specific goals are to: (1) characterize the collaboration networks, (2) identify boundary-spanning authors and evaluate their structural importance for network connectivity, (3) assess the influence of research field and country homophily on collaboration formation.

Methods: Bibliographic data were collected from Scopus covering publications from 2014 to 2025 across ten representative journals, five in engineering education and five in STEM education. An author-paper bipartite network was constructed and projected into co-authorship networks. Network properties including density and giant component size were computed. Boundary-spanning authors were identified based on cross-domain publication histories, and their structural contributions were assessed through node-removal simulations. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) were estimated to examine the effects of country and field homophily on collaboration formation.

Results: The combined collaboration network is sparse but connected, with a low overall density and a giant component comprising 9,100 of 19,619 nodes (46.38%) in the bipartite network. STEM education exhibits higher connectivity than engineering education. Cross-domain authors constitute only 3.4% of the author population, yet their average degree substantially exceeds that of single-domain authors. Removing these authors reduces the giant component by more than half, indicating their critical bridging role. ERGM results show that country homophily strongly shapes collaboration patterns, while field homophily also exerts a significant but weaker effect. Cross-domain collaboration increased steadily from 2017 to 2021 before declining after 2022.

Conclusion: Global collaboration between engineering education and STEM education exhibits a “dense-within, sparse-between” structure, with strong internal clustering but fragile cross-domain connectivity. A small group of boundary-spanning authors plays a disproportionate role in maintaining network integration, making cross-field collaboration vulnerable to disruption. Strengthening durable cross-domain and cross-national collaboration mechanisms is essential for fostering a more resilient and integrated global education research ecosystem.