Exploring Educational Research during the COVID-19 Pandemic: 2020-2021

Abstract

Education has been one of the areas most affected by the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic since December 2019. This bibliometric review presents “the big picture” of the knowledge production on educational research conducted between January 1, 2020, and October 31, 2021. For this purpose, the current status of the related knowledge base, the intellectual structure, and topical foci were analyzed through descriptive and bibliometric analyses using VOSviewer, Tableau, and Web of Science (WoS) analytical tools. The data set included a total of 3774 articles accessed through WoS. The findings reveal a rapidly growing global interest in educational studies related to the pandemic outbreak. However, highly skewed geographical distribution indicates an imbalance in the number of documents. Almost one-fifth of all researchers are from the USA, and authors from the top ten most productive countries published more than half of all publications. Citation and co-citation analyses shed light on the most prominent components of the related knowledge base. The intellectual structure is based on five “schools of thought” labelled “Global Perspectives to Education”, “Medical Education”, “Educational Psychology”, “Instructional Technologies for the 21^st Century Education” and “Higher Education Studies”. Similarly, topical foci of the knowledge base yielded four distinct clusters concentrated on “Digitalization of Education”, “The Impacts of Psychological Variables”, “Medical Studies”, and “Curriculum and Instruction”. The current research fronts, the lack of topical coverage and other remarkable results are discussed in order to provide a baseline for further studies.