Graduate employability skills, trending avenues and research gaps: a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis

PurposeCurrent study theoretically and technically analyzed the empirical literature on Graduate Employability Skills (GES) and aimed to investigate ten research questions: 1) the specific features of the retrieved empirical studies on GES, 2) the trends of empirical scientific production of GES, 3) the most relevant and high-impact sources in the field of GES, 4) clustering the sources through Bradford’s Law of Scattering, 5) the highly cited articles on GES, 6) the most relevant countries on GES, 7) the most pertinent and high-impact authors on GES, 8) authors' productivity through Lotka’s Law of authors’ Scientific Productivity, 9) the trending research avenues for future investigations on GES, and 10) identified research gaps relevant to the field of GES.Design/methodology/approachThe Scopus database was used to extract data, and VOSviewer and Biblioshony tools were used for the study's bibliometric analysis and systematic literature evaluation.FindingsThe present study analyzed 864 sources containing 1816 articles from 4378 authors that address GES. Publications on GES were steadily increasing, with a notable upswing beginning in 2010 and reaching a record high of 232 articles in 2019. The UK, Australia, and Malaysia are the top three nations in terms of number of publications and cumulative citations. The thematic map of keywords revealed which themes future researchers need to investigate: work-integrated learning, entrepreneurship, industry 4.0, sustainability, management education, business education, project-based learning, education, curriculum development, learning, and graduate skills.Originality/valueThe present study provides theoretical, practical, and social implications for graduates, the higher education industry, policymakers, the economy, and society.