What do empirical studies on technology leadership in education tell us?: content analysis, bibliometric analysis, and text mining

The purpose of the study was to investigate 15 years of empirical research on technology leadership in education to examine the trends of the studies, synthesize their relevant features, and reveal the clusters and characteristics of their abstracts. The review included 85 empirical studies indexed in the Web of Science or Scopus databases between 2007 and 2021. Content analysis, bibliometric analysis, and text mining were employed, with results that revealed growing scholarly interest over the last few years in studying technology leadership in education, and that quantitative studies were the predominant research approach. It was also seen that more than a quarter of the studies were published in seven journals and that studies locally cited (by other studies included in the analysis) mostly referred to journals with a focus on policy, theory, and practice for technology in educational organizations. Moreover, the abstracts of the studies were clustered within four categories, which were supported with the results related to the patterns of keywords and cited papers. Possible explanations for these findings and limitations were discussed, and implications and recommendations for future studies were suggested.