Reflective Thinking: A Bibliometric Analysis of Four Decades of Research and Insights for Future Studies

Abstract

Reflective thinking (RT) is one of the higher-order thinking skills which have been of great importance to the researchers from a variety of disciplines for years. Although the significance of RT has been discussed in many studies and many different forms, there are no bibliometric studies conducted on this topic. This study aims to examine the current state and development of research in RT based on the data available in the Web of Science (WoS). To do this, a bibliometric approach was adopted to map the research literature on RT using the metadata from the WoS between 1986 and 2023 in terms of the distribution of the articles by year of publication and average citation status, the most productive journals publishing on RT and number of RT-related citations, the most cited RT articles and authors, top countries in which the articles about RT were cited most, the authors who have produced the most articles on RT, their publications and corresponding author(s)’ countries, and the trend of words associated with RT in the articles. Our main contribution is the quantitative methodological design for examining the evolution of reflective thinking research, which is highly multidisciplinary and covers a large volume of publications. We believe that this study provides a comprehensive review of the studies on RT and provides interesting insights about the development of the field for future research.