Mapping the Global Landscape of Civic Education: A Bibliometric Analysis of Central Asia’s Indexed Visibility

Civic education has expanded from nationally bounded instruction about institutions and participation into a diverse field encompassing global citizenship, sustainability, digital life, and identity formation. Yet the international indexes through which this expansion is commonly mapped may reproduce geographic and linguistic inequalities. This bibliometric review maps 4954 records retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection for 1975 to 24 August 2026 examines Central Asia’s visibility within that English-dominant corpus. Performance analysis and thematic mapping were conducted in R using Bibliometrix and Biblioshiny. Because exported cited-reference metadata were incomplete, conceptual change was examined through author keywords and title terms rather than citation networks. Publication output grew at an annual rate of 12.94%, with marked acceleration after 2005; the United States and the United Kingdom were the most frequently represented countries in author-affiliation metadata. A manual screening identified 12 records with Central Asian institutional affiliations, but distinguished that only eight of these substantively focused on the region. Thematic evolution indicated increasing attention to global citizenship, education for sustainable development, and digital citizenship, alongside continuing concern with participation, identity, students, and schools. Central Asian country names and regional identity terms did not appear among the displayed trend topics. This pattern indicates limited visibility in the retrieved corpus, not an absence of regional knowledge. Future research should use multilingual, multi-database corpus construction and comparative school-level studies that bring Central Asian experience into international theory and evidence.