The Engineering Education Research (EER) community in Europe and across the globe has grown considerably in the past decades. There have been some examinations to date of the research corpus that has evolved, although these have been predominantly US-based. An emerging literature has started to chart the ways in which European EER-researchers have a distinctive tradition, which might at least in part be due to the influence of the European “Didaktik” tradition, which conceptualizes teaching and learning as fundamentally resting on an interplay between student, teacher, and the content (subject matter). This is represented in the “Didaktik triangle” where student, teacher, and the content are placed on the vertices of the triangle, and the sides of the triangle represent three important interrelations. This study compares the 50 most highly cited papers in each of the European Journal of Engineering Education (EJEE) and the US-based Journal of Engineering Education (JEE). Our analysis of how the topic(s) of the papers related to the “Didaktik triangle” shows that the conceptualization of the object of study in the EJEE papers was more related to the “Didaktik triangle” as a whole compared with papers published in JEE. The results of our study provide further evidence that there are, indeed, some differences in the aims of American and European EER. A global community would do well to try to draw on the strengths of both of these traditions.