Professional Development of Academic Staff Based on the Use of Digital Resources: Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The aim of the article is to determine the categories of digital resources that are actually represented in the scholarly literature on the professional development of academic staff, and to substantiate a preliminary functional matrix that links these categories to the tasks they serve within the development cycle. The study combines a bibliometric survey of the Google Scholar database with a qualitative content analysis of a purposively assembled corpus of 22 Ukrainian- and English-language sources, each unit of which was coded by language, year of publication, document type, thematic cluster, category of digital resource and declared function. The bibliometric survey returned 22,900 Ukrainian-language results for the query 'professional development of pedagogues', 11,500 for 'use of digital resources in professional development' and 1,160 for the combined query, as against 5,330,000, 7,140,000 and 2,530,000 respectively for the equivalent English-language queries. The narrowly focused query accounts for 47.5 per cent of the broad topic in the English-language segment but for only 5.1 per cent in the Ukrainian-language one, a ninefold difference in the degree to which the specific problem has been elaborated. Content analysis of the corpus distinguished six thematic clusters, the largest of which are digital competence frameworks and digital resources considered within the theory of professional development, and identified twelve categories of digital resources that serve four functions: knowledge acquisition, research visibility and publication monitoring, professional self-presentation, and collaborative interaction. Not a single source in the corpus relates particular resource categories to particular stages or organisational forms of development, and none verifies such a relationship empirically. The scientific novelty of the study consists in the first quantified comparison of the Ukrainian- and English-language segments of this research field and in the resource-function matrix derived from the corpus, which converts a descriptive enumeration of digital tools into an analytical instrument. The practical significance lies in the possibility of using the matrix when designing institutional professional development programmes, individual development trajectories and in-house training for academic staff of Ukrainian universities.