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Montessori Research in Early Childhood Education: A Bibliometric Analysis of Knowledge Structure and Thematic Development
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Abstract
Montessori research in early childhood education has expanded over the past decade, yet its intellectual organization remains less clearly understood than its pedagogical appeal. Existing scholarship has generated important evidence on child development, classroom practice, and learning outcomes, but the field still requires a clearer view of how authority, themes, and visibility are distributed across the literature. This study examines the knowledge structure and thematic development of Montessori research in early childhood education through a bibliometric approach. Bibliographic data were collected from Scopus as the primary database and Google Scholar as a supplementary source for the period 2015–2025. After relevance screening, the final corpus consisted of 78 publications. The dataset was analyzed using VOSviewer to examine publication trends, influential authors, citation visibility, co-authorship patterns, and keyword co-occurrence. The findings show increasing publication activity after 2018, alongside a concentrated structure of scholarly influence around a limited group of authors, particularly Angeline S. Lillard. The thematic structure remains anchored in child development, Montessori pedagogy, early learning, and prepared educational environments. At the same time, inclusion, cultural adaptation, digital integration, public Montessori schooling, and context-specific implementation are visible but less consolidated. These findings suggest that Montessori research is growing through continuity and partial diversification rather than through evenly distributed expansion. The study contributes globally by clarifying how internationally visible Montessori scholarship is currently structured, identifying underconsolidated areas that deserve stronger cross-cultural and multilingual inquiry, and showing why future research must move beyond repeated effectiveness claims toward broader epistemic, methodological, and geographic representation within global early childhood education debates and practice in diverse contexts.
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