Demystifying the Research on Special Education: a Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Special education can be defined as an instruction that are designed specifically for the students who are exceptional; whereby, it provides unusual needs in terms of their better learning as this might require different teaching techniques, special materials or special equipment and facilities (Huefer, 2006). Since this topic is emerging, there is need to conduct a study to examine the research trend and insight of special education publications. Based on the researcher’s knowledge, almost no studies had conducted by deploying bibliometric analysis on this subject. Thus, this study is conducted to identify the trends of earlier studies in special education by using bibliometric analysis approach. The data used in the bibliometric indicators were deliberately selected and retrieved from Scopus database. In overall, there are 11,102 documents were retrieved from the Scopus database; whereby, this is evident that the Special Education areas of studies has becoming a crucial part in the educational world since the year 2010 until the current year 2022. The findings from this study believe to benefits especially to novice researchers on this topic.