Finding Europe’s niche: science mapping the knowledge base on educational leadership and management in Europe, 1960–2018

This review of research used science mapping to document European literature in the field of educational leadership and management (EDLM) and assess the extent to which there is a distinctive ‘European niche’ in this field. The review documents the volume, growth trajectory, and geographic distribution of EDLM scholarship and analyzes the intellectual structure and key topics studied in this literature. The authors identified 1,039 articles authored in continental European societies that had been published in 22 Scopus-indexed, EDLM journals. Bibliographic data associated with these articles were exported from Scopus and analyzed using Excel and VOSviewer programs. The review identified a robust European literature distinguished by 4 Schools of Thought. Two of these, ‘School Improvement and School Effectiveness’, and the ‘Social-Economic Effects of Education’ evidenced strong contributions from European scholars. Our results provide a baseline for future reviews of this literature and a basis for benchmarking the European literature against other regional literatures in EDLM from around the world.