Evolution of Educational Leadership: A Bibliometric Analysis of International Publications

Abstract

Abstract Research on educational leadership has received significant scholarly attention for over half a century, resulting in a vast body of literature on the subject. Numerous studies and inquiries have highlighted that educational leadership is an exceedingly complex and vital phenomenon. However, a gap persists in scholarly discourse concerning the presentation of this knowledge base through bibliometric analysis. This study seeks to provide an overview of the evolution of this concept by identifying articles published in journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) database between 1993 and 2024. The search employed terms such as "educational leadership", „educational management” "leadership in education," "school leadership”, „teacher leadership”, „style leadership in education” and „school improvement”yielding an initial total of 3089 articles. Subsequently, following the application of inclusion and exclusion criteria, 1583 studies were retained for analysis. The research encompasses the general profile of articles, the annual distribution of article frequency, the most prolific researchers, journals, and countries by article count, the most influential articles based on citation count, the most frequently recurring author keywords, and the year of publication of these articles. The contribution of this study lies primarily in highlighting the systematic methodologies employed in research analyses in educational leadership and management. Additionally, collaborative patterns among authors, universities, and countries are presented and analyzed. The conclusions provide valuable insights for researchers into the detailed evolution of educational leadership through the structuring of existing literature in the field. Furthermore, based on these findings, some suggestions have been made for identifying new research themes in this field, both conceptually and empirically.