The Evolving Knowledge Base on Teacher Professionalism: A Bibliometric Review from 1960 to 2024

Abstract

Teachers have historically been regarded as professionals who have the power over their work and willingly take responsibility for their practices. Teacher professionalism is closely linked to enhancing teachers' expertise and performance, which is reflected in the improvement of educational standards. The current research aimed to document the volume, development trend, geographical distribution of the research on teacher professionalism, identify the highest impact documents, authors, and journals, uncover the sub-disciplines within the field, and examine the evolution of the concepts over three distinct time periods (1961-2000, 2001-2018, 2019-2024). For this purpose, a total of 793 research documents on the related subject were accessed in the Scopus database. The study used descriptive and bibliometric analyses. Author co-citation analysis revealed four clusters founded on the themes of teacher professional learning, professionalism, teacher identity, and teacher training. Thematic analysis determined professional autonomy, professional identity, special education, and learning outcomes as emerging concepts.