Early Bilingual Education: A General Bibliometric Approach and Content Analysis Using SciMAT

Abstract

Bilingual and multilingual education have certainly gained popularity in the past decades since societies are increasingly becoming more aware of the need to welcome additional languages into the school curricula in order to equip citizens with a functional use of several languages. However, research about the extent to which bilingual practices are present at preschool education has not been fully exploited, mainly because this is a non-obligatory educational stage in most countries, and the wide variety of educational contexts in which practices can take place. This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of early bilingual education, using as a reference the publications in the Web of Science Core Collection from 1988 to 2022. For this purpose, 1011 publications were analysed by applying advanced bibliometric techniques in SciMAT bibliometric analysis software. This research is hoped to serve as a framework to identify existing research lines and outline new ones, establishing synergetic relationships that were not visible without the maps generated herein.