Exploring high impact scholarship in research on student's evaluation of teaching (SET)

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) is the most common way of assessing teaching quality at universities. Since the introduction of SET procedures at the start of the previous century, thousands of research studies on the validity, reliability and utility of SET were written. By means of a citation analysis on journal articles included in Google Scholar, Scopus, and the Social Science Citation Index (Web of Science), this paper aims at mapping the high impact studies, the leading researchers, and the key journals in this research field. The results indicate that, although we find considerable overlap between the three databases, a number of high impact journal papers are not included in all three databases. Furthermore, the analysis reveals three main topics in the SET literature: the use of SET, validity issues concerning SET, and the construction and validation of SET instruments. Also, it is shown that many high impact studies were written by only a few researchers, with Herbert Marsh as the leading author. Although some of the most impactful studies date back to the 1960s, it's coming of age situates in the seventies. Since then SET became increasingly visible. The high proportion (25%) of impactful articles since 2000 indeed suggests a trend of continuous growth in SET research. At the same time, the historical knowledge in the form of classic studies on SET lives on through the many citations in recent studies. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.