Twenty years of research development on teachers’ critical thinking: Current status and future implications——A bibliometric analysis of research articles collected in WOS

Teachers’ critical thinking, an essential factor affecting their professional development, has recently been a hot topic in the field of teacher education research. In order to systematically investigate the current research status of teachers’ critical thinking and its future development, Biblioshiny software (R-studio cloud), togeteher with manual sorting and deleting, has been adopted to conduct a visualization analysis of 1273 articles collected in the Web of Science (WOS) core collection database over the last two decades (2002-2021). Firstly, this study analyzes the annual production, sources, cited documents, authors, affiliations and countries to determine the research trend and focal research power. Secondly, research hotspots of teachers’ critical thinking were obtained by word treemap, keywords co-occurrence network, cluster parts and thematic maps. Subsequently, this study highlights future research directions by the above analysis. A series of bibliometric analysis has concluded that the number of published articles demonstrates an apparent increasing trend and the recent five years have particularly witnessed a strong momentum. Furthermore, among the countries, the USA plays a leading role in teachers’ critical thinking research while the contribution of developing countries in this research field has become more apparent than ever in recent years. In addition, core research journals, authors, institutions and mostly cited documents have also been retrieved through bibliometric analysis. Regarding the hotspots, teachers’ critical thinking research themes have been constantly evolving from 2002 to 2021. Therefore, it has been concluded that teachers’ knowledge, performance and belief are the primary development direction of their critical thinking research not only at present but also in the future. This article has drawn some meaningful conclusions and implications for future research in this research field based partly on the acknowledged current research limitations.