Conceptual Boundaries and Terminological Variability in Scopus-Indexed Teacher Digital Competence Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Research on teacher digital competence has expanded sharply over the past decade. However, the field’s development, thematic structure, and underlying terminological characteristics have remained under-examined. The rapid integration of artificial intelligence has compounded this challenge, introducing new competence-related constructs and reshaping the field’s conceptual landscape. In the context of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets 4.4 (developing digital skills) and 4.c (ensuring a supply of qualified teachers), this raises the question of whether the knowledge base is developing coherently. To address this question, we analyse a corpus of 4097 Scopus-indexed publications retrieved through a broad search on teacher digital competence, published between 2015 and 2025, using longitudinal bibliometric analysis and science mapping. The analysis reveals marked terminological variability: a high Pielou’s evenness index (J′ = 0.86) indicates that occurrences are distributed relatively evenly across 8567 normalised terms, suggesting the absence of a strongly dominant terminological core at the corpus level, while singleton terms account for a large share of the vocabulary (76%), pointing to substantial fragmentation. Against this fragmented backdrop, an AI-oriented strand accounts for 10.4% of the corpus and rises to 26.1% of annual output by 2025; rather than displacing established competence-related concepts, AI-related concepts form an emerging technological layer within teacher digital competence research. These thematic patterns are accompanied by uneven publication activity and international collaboration. Taken together, these findings indicate that the conceptual boundaries of teacher digital competence research are shaped by substantial terminological variability and ongoing thematic expansion. They further highlight the importance of transparent search strategies and greater terminological clarity and consistency for improving the comparability, reproducibility, and cumulative development of research in this field.