Bibliometric Analysis of the Studies on Critical Thinking in Educational Research: An Insight from the Last Four Decades (1980-2022)

In this bibliometric analysis study, it was aimed to systematically review and analyze the existing CT literature and provide an overall outlook and current status of research on CT using the publication and citation data extracted from the WoS database. For this purpose, 5064 articles and reviews on CT published in journals indexed in the WoS database were included in the bibliometric analysis. It was found that research on CT is an emerging area of inquiry and the interest in CT has grown exponentially in the last two decades. Also, publications are mostly published in higher education journals and the journals related to psychology, sociology, and philosophy as well as education technology journals. The USA absolutely leads the production and dissemination of scientific research on CT with other predominantly English-speaking countries as well as some other countries in Asia. Besides, the authors who work on higher education, psychology, and educational technology come to the fore in productivity and number of citations. Although scientific collaboration exists among the institutions and countries in the field of CT, this scientific collaboration occurs mostly among the institutions or countries which are close to each other either geographically or culturally. Five major clusters emerged in the co-word analysis: higher education, 21st century literacy skills, educational psychology and assessment and evaluation, educational technology, the effect of student-centered teaching/learning strategies on the CT, and work life, civic responsibility and social life of individuals.