Bibliometric Analysis of Educational Researches on Bilingualism

The aim of this research is to perform a bibliometric analysis of published academic studies on “bilingualism” in the category of educational research in the Web of Science (WoS) database. Research titles were searched using the keyword “bilingualism” in all WoS data bases on the Web of Knowledge Web page. In order to reach a holistic interpretation, the study was done to cover the 51-year time period between the years 1970-2021 by starting from the oldest date available in the database. As a result of the search, the bibliometric data of the 1975 academic study was used as the data set of the study. The bibliometric analysis was used as the data analysis technique in the study. The research topics and orientations of the academic publications examined within the scope of the study were visually mapped through the keywords in the publications. Within this direction, WordArt online word cloud software was preferred. The social network analysis of the keywords of the 1975 academic study on bilingualism that is one of the bibliometric analysis tools, was visualized by using the VOSviewer (Version 1.6.16) package program. As a result of the analysis done, the year 2020 was the year with the most publications on bilingualism in the WoS database. In the field, mostly English publications were made. Most of the detected publications are of the article type. The California State University System – USA ranks first as the institution in which the authors publish on bilingualism. Most publications on bilingualism were done in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. The country with the most publications and the country with the most cooperation network is the USA. It has been determined that concepts such as bilingualism, multilingualism, bilingual education, language policy, language switching, dual literacy, identity, language ideologies, second language acquisition, code change and literacy are used in scientific publications. It is thought that the study draws a broad framework for researchers in the field and contributes to the field