Mapping Pre-School Children Research: A Bibliometric Analysis of Scopus-Indexed Publications from 1998 to 2026

Research on pre-school children and their readiness for formal schooling underpins policy and practice in early childhood education, yet the structure of this literature has rarely been examined quantitatively. This study maps the landscape of pre-school children research indexed in Scopus in order to provide a comprehensive reference for researchers entering the field. Three objectives guide the analysis: to evaluate the trend of publications on pre-school children research, to determine its key topic areas, and to identify its major contributors. A bibliometric method was applied to 37 documents retrieved from the Scopus database in July 2026 using a query combining kindergarten, preschool, readiness, and primary schools, with no restrictions on document type, year, subject area, or language. Descriptive analyses drew on the Scopus analyse search results function, and VOSviewer software version 1.6.19 was used to construct co-occurrence and co-authorship visualisation maps. Findings show that the literature originates in 1998, remains sparse and intermittent for two decades, and then accelerates markedly from 2024, with more than one third of all documents appearing in 2024 to 2026. Output is dispersed across a wide range of journals and subject areas, with Social Sciences, Psychology, and Medicine jointly accounting for 85.9 percent of subject assignments. Keyword co-occurrence analysis identifies school readiness, kindergarten, child development, and academic achievement as the thematic core. Contributions are geographically concentrated, with the United States, Turkey, and China producing the majority of documents and Southeast Asia and other developing regions almost absent. The study contributes a baseline map of a small but growing field, complementing meta-analyses and structured literature reviews, and identifies clear opportunities for geographic diversification and interdisciplinary collaboration in pre-school children research.

Pre-School Children; School Readiness; Bibliometric Analysis; Vosviewer; Scopus; Early Childhood Education

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