Global Research Trends in School Bullying: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

School bullying is recognised as a global issue that raises academic and practitioner concerns because of its adverse consequences on students' physical, mental, and subjective well-being. This study aims to comprehensively examine the area of research on school bullying by performing a bibliometric analysis of 634 publications between 1996 and August 2022 from the Scopus database. Apart from that, this study highlights the prolific and most influential countries, authors, sources and journal articles in the area, and the research topics on which researchers have been working. The findings showed that the USA, the UK, and China are the most productive countries in school bullying. Note that Smith, P.K. from UK and Espelage, D.L. from the US are the most active and among the most influential authors. The Journal of School Violence and the International Journal of Bullying Prevention are the most active journals, and the Journal of Adolescent Health and Aggressive Behavior are the most cited journals. Meanwhile, the journal article by Wang, Iannotti, and Nansel (2009) is the most cited article, being published in the most cited journals. Several areas that are currently well explored, such as victimisation, prevention, and cyberbullying, have been discovered. The analysis also presented some recently investigated keywords, such as mental health, peer aggression, bullying perpetration, and self-control, which can be explored further. This paper's findings trace the trend and contribute to the scholarly literature on collective school bullying knowledge.