Bilingual education research: A bibliometric study

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze through bibliometric indicators the scientific literature related to bilingual education published between 1968 and September 2018. Bilingual education is shaping current educational systems all around the world. Bilingualism is thus a latent phenomenon in today’s society and the number of educational practices including at least two languages in the teaching process is on the increase. Hence, the need to conduct a study with the objective of knowing where we stand as far as research is concerned and where it is headed for. For the sake of this study, the research corpus was obtained in the Science Citation Index and in the Social Science Citation Index. 1,725 articles were retrieved, which have been published in journals of various thematic areas. The results show a sharp increase in scientific production. 37 annual papers have been published on average since 1968 and about 128 annual papers if only the last decade is taken into consideration. Additionally, a high degree of multidisciplinarity and participation has been noticed in different areas such as education, linguistics or humanities.