Educational drama in English language education: a review of bibliometric analysis

Educational drama has been a longstanding tool in English language education (ELE), and a number of studies have reviewed its applications. Nevertheless, there remains a dearth of bibliometric analysis studies in this field. This bibliometric review used performance analysis and science mapping methodology with VOSviewer. Under certain conditions, 326 documents (between 1977 and 2023) were extracted from the Scopus database on January 6, 2024. The objective of this study is to examine publication patterns, geographic distribution, country contributions and collaborations, influential journals, contributing scholars, author co-citation networks, frequently repeated author keywords, the intellectual structures, and research trends on this topic. Despite the overall growth pattern, there was substantial geographical variation of documents published in the existing journals and emerging regions. It also identified the top seven most contributing scholars and four schools of thought under the author co-citation network. Besides, the top 10 most frequently repeated keywords, as well as seven clusters of the intellectual structure of the knowledge base, emerged within the literature. The review concludes by addressing the research trends in this field and recommending future research directions. These findings are important to understand the current situation in this field and establish a foundation for future studies.