Intellectual landscape of scholarly work on 21st century skills: A bibliometric and science mapping analysis

Abstract

A quick search on Google Scholar for the exact phrase ‘21st century skills’ resulted in three thousand plus results. More than two-third of these are dated within the last decade, indicating growing attention to the topic in the academia. The purpose of the current study is to investigate existing literature on 21st century skills by employing techniques of bibliometric and science mapping analysis to provide a helicopter view of scholarly work on 21st century skills. The search was conducted on SCOPUS database during 2021 using the keyword ‘21st century skills’ which produced 1644 results. Further refinements were made using publication year, document type and language reducing the sample size to 1281 documents. Data were analysed employing various bibliometric indicators such as number of publications, contributing authors, institutions and countries, citation, co-citation, and keywords. The results indicated an exponential growth in the number scholarly publication on the topic since 2010. Similarly, a positive trend in average citations was also observed in recent years. USA was the biggest contributor to the number of publications, followed by Indonesia, and Malaysia respectively. With respect to author collaboration, Nussbaum, M. was found the highest collaborator, followed by Griffin P., and Sharples M. while among the institutions, University of Melbourne was at the top. Analysis of the keywords revealed that, specific 21st century skills, learning tools and processes, technological advancement, and education and training are amongst the most common research themes. Findings of the current study provide insights into future research trends on the topic of 21st century skills.