Global trends in character education research: a bibliometric-based systematic review

Abstract

Character education has become a strategic issue in global education because of its role in shaping learners with integrity, social responsibility, and civic awareness. Responding to reviewer concerns about methodological transparency, this revised study explicitly combines bibliometric mapping with a content-based systematic synthesis. Data were retrieved from Scopus on February 5, 2026, but the analytical window was restricted to complete publication years from January 2016 to December 2025. A refined bibliometric corpus of 589 English-language journal articles was analyzed, and 512 articles were retained for content-oriented synthesis after eligibility screening. The procedure was organized through a PRISMA-informed flow, explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria, metadata quality checking, and independent relevance screening. VOSviewer was used to map publication trends, author productivity, institutional and country contributions, and keyword co-occurrence, overlay, and density patterns. The findings show a generally increasing publication trend, with character education and civic education occupying central positions in the intellectual structure of the field. Content synthesis identifies four substantive directions: virtue ethics and moral formation, democratic civic education, contextual/local wisdom-based character education, and practice-oriented innovations such as project-based learning, empathy, action civics, and digital literacy. The study contributes by clarifying both the quantitative structure and substantive development of character education research while acknowledging the limitations of Scopus-only, English-language, and bibliometric evidence.