Research Trends in Sport Pedagogy and Physical Education: A Bibliometric Analysis of Motivation, Self-Efficacy, Creativity, and Critical Thinking.

Abstract

Contemporary sport pedagogy increasingly emphasises learner-centred, inclusive, and psychologically supportive approaches. This bibliometric review mapped research at the intersection of Physical Education, well-being-related perspectives, and motivation, self-efficacy, creativity, and critical thinking. Scopus and the Web of Science Core Collection were searched, and the records were processed in R (version 4.5.0) using the bibliometrix package (version 5.3.0) and its Biblioshiny web interface. The searches identified 683 records; after 208 initial duplicates were removed, all 475 unique records were re-screened. A further eight residual duplicates and 261 ineligible records were removed, yielding 206 documents published between 2008 and 2026 across 95 sources. The corpus averaged 16.35 citations per document and 26.7% international co-authorship. Motivation was explicitly represented in 174 documents (84.5%), self-efficacy in 34 (16.5%), creativity in 16 (7.8%), and critical thinking in four (1.9%). A 58-node author-keyword network and a five-cluster thematic map showed substantially greater consolidation around motivation and self-determination theory than around creativity or critical thinking. These findings describe the retrieved intersectional corpus rather than the whole Physical Education literature.