Moral Education (2010-2019): A Bibliometric Study (Part 1)

Recently, moral education has developed into a popular theme of study in various countries. Mapping of moral education research that includes publication trends, the most cited articles, the most contributing journals and publishers, and the terms in the author keywords needs to be done to provide direction for future research. This article aims at identifying and analyzing moral education studies that have been published in reputable international journals in the 2010-2019 timeframe through bibliometric studies. This study employed a systematic and structured mind-mapping method, which includes four stages: (1) searching articles through the Publish or Perish applications from the Scopus database; (2) filtering articles to be included in bibliometric analysis; (3) checking and completing the article metadata; and (4) conducting bibliometric analysis through VOSviewer application. Four findings are yielded from the analysis: (1) yearly moral education publication trends. The analysis showed an increasing publication trend at the end of 2019; (2) the most cited article. Most citations occurred in moral education articles in the scope of business with 56 number of citations; (3) journals and publishers that published the most moral education articles. The most contributing journal is the Journal of Moral Education, and the most contributing publisher is Routledge or Taylor and Francis; and (4) the most widely used author keywords in moral education articles. The keyword term that is most widely used by authors is 'moral education'. This study concluded that publications in moral education have increased, but the citation is still in a decreasing pattern. Therefore, making a top-cited article becomes an opportunity for future research. © 2020 Horizon Research Publishing. All rights reserved.