Bibliometric Analysis of 21st Century Research Trends in Extracurricular Activities

Abstract

By discovering and assessing articles in social sciences, this research explores the various aspects of current extracurricular activities research to further understand the knowledge base of this topic. The primary purpose of this study is to analyse the last 20 years of extracurricular activities research published in the Scopus database. VOSviewer software was used to perform bibliometric analysis such as co-occurrence, bibliographic coupling and co-authorship. Microsoft Excel was utilised to generate the tables and graphs in this paper. The analysis resulted in some interesting information which includes the steady growth of publications in extracurricular activities research that strongly indicates that it is still a trending topic and worth to be explored further. The Journal of Youth and Adolescence and the United States of America are the top journal and country that have contributed to this field of research, respectively. The analysis shows that the author key concepts are changing proportionally and apart from academic accomplishment and social capital that remain as the foci of interest, the adolescence developments is increasingly significant for future extracurricular activities research as well. This study also highlights the collaborative research networks of extracurricular activities among the authors across the globe. Consequently, it provides the opportunity to build networks among multiple countries that have significantly contributed to this area of research globally. As this is one of the initial Scopus databased bibliometric literature review on extracurricular activities, its contributions are not only on addressing the conceptual or contextual gaps for researchers that are interested in this discipline, but hopefully it will also be able to highlight some prospective areas that could be further explored in the near future.