Background The increasing integration of digital technology into education has raised concerns about students’ ability to participate responsibly in a digital society, highlighting the importance of Digital Citizenship Education (DCE) in strengthening Competencies for a Democratic Culture (CDC). However, studies mapping the relationship between DCE and CDC are limited. This study fills a gap in previous bibliometric research by explicitly linking DCE to DCC and providing comprehensive mapping based on DCC indicators. This study provides a foundation for researchers and institutions to investigate future research and supports the development of instructional models for strengthening the CDC through DCE to realize quality education. Methods A bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer, Bibliometrix, Publish or Perish, Microsoft Excel 2021, and Datawrapper was conducted to map the research network, analyze co-occurrence and emerging themes, identify highly cited publications, and examine leading authors and countries based on data from the Scopus database. Results The tracking identified 217 documents from 2008 to 2026. The number of publications is expected to increase significantly from 2023 to 2025, indicating growing research interest. The most frequently co-occurring terms were digital citizenship and rights, reflecting the field’s underlying knowledge structure. Emerging themes are dominated by attitude-related constructs such as attitude and digital empathy. However, pedagogical terms remain limited, and even the terms “learning models” and “assessment” do not appear in the network. The research landscape is influenced by highly cited works, such as Jones and Mitchell, with the United States as the leading contributor to both publications and citations. Conclusion Research on DCE-CDC has grown significantly in recent years, with digital citizenship and rights forming the core body of knowledge. However, the research landscape remains dominated by attitude-oriented themes, while pedagogical dimensions, particularly learning models and assessments, still receive insufficient attention.
Corresponding author: Kokom Komalasari Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed.
Grant information: This research was supported by The Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP) on behalf of The Indonesian Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology and managed under the EQUITY Program [Contract No. 4314/B3/DT.03.08/2025 and No. 352/UN40/HK.00.10/2025].
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Copyright: © 2026 Komalasari K et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. How to cite: Komalasari K, Untari S, Indrawadi J et al. A Bibliometric Analysis of Digital Citizenship Education and Competences for Democratic Culture: Global Trends, Knowledge Structure, and Future Research Agenda [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]. F1000Research 2026, 15:1292 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.187288.1) First published: 04 Aug 2026, 15:1292 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.187288.1) Latest published: 04 Aug 2026, 15:1292 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.187288.1)
Citizenship activities continue to evolve alongside advances in digital technology, expanding the public sphere beyond physical interactions to include online interaction. Interactions mediated by the latest technology are increasingly widespread in society, reflecting the public’s growing acceptance of digital resources across various social media and other digital ecosystems (E. K.-M. Chong et al., 2021; Malik, 2024). In the context of education, online learning platforms are becoming increasingly attractive and challenging, regarded as a contemporary approach that relies on digital capabilities (Hanewald, 2013). In this situation, educational institutions are expected to prepare graduates who are not only skilled in using online tools but also responsible, critical, and reflective digital citizens who uphold democratic culture.
It must be acknowledged that most students today are connected to technology. The 2022 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) report revealed that most students use television, the Internet, and print and online newspapers to access social and political information (Schulz et al., 2023). Unfortunately, the lack of responsibility in using digital resources often makes them victims or even perpetrators of cybercrimes (Beauchere, 2018; Malik, 2024). This phenomenon is destructive and has the potential to undermine the quality of democratic culture, which should go hand in hand with the concept of digital citizenship, programmatically actualized within the DCE framework to shape citizens who are wise and responsible in their use of digital technology (Harrison & Polizi, 2021). This objective is certainly relevant to a set of CDC with four primary keys, namely values, attitudes, skills, and knowledge, and critical understanding (Richardson & Milovidov, 2022), making it a strategic skill in the 21st century that has attracted the attention of many parties to study it from various perspectives.
Several studies have examined the influence of digital media on learning, including online games (Zheng et al., 2025) and social media (Wohleb et al., 2014). Other studies have focused on the challenges and innovative educational strategies to bridge the digital citizenship literacy gap (Iskandar et al., 2025). Kumari et al. (2023) emphasized the importance of DCE in preparing students to become responsible digital citizens. Unfortunately, most research still focuses on the operational aspects of digital device use in the learning process. In contrast, others have begun to address the attitudinal dimensions of CDC, such as ethics and responsibility. However, its relationship with CDC indicators within a comprehensive framework has not been a central concern in existing studies.
In addition to empirical research, mapping research is essential for tracking DCE-CDC. In the Scopus database, we found two bibliometric mapping studies on DCE research, which analyzed 411 documents from 2010–2019 (Fernández-P et al., 2020) and 96 documents from 2010–2021 (Palaz et al., 2022). However, neither study linked digital citizenship to CDC and thus did not address the need to understand publication trends and the field’s evolution. To fill this gap, our study highlights trends and directions in DCE studies related to CDC by analyzing bibliographic metadata to identify research patterns. This study not only does this research fills a gap in the literature but also provides new insights for researchers and institutions regarding DCE-CDC. Specifically, this study addresses the following three questions.
RQ 1: What are the global trends in DCE-CDC research?
RQ 2: What is the knowledge structure of DCE-CDC research?
RQ 3: What are the directions for the future research agenda in the DCE-CDC field?
The massive use of digital media in recent years has made the concept of Digital Citizenship increasingly popular among the public. Facts show that Billions of people worldwide use various technologies, thus creating a digital society (Ribble & Bailey, 2007), with activities increasingly connected to digital resources ranging from creating, consuming, socializing, communicating, education, medical access, and employment (Richardson & Milovidov, 2022; Sincar, 2012a; Yildiz et al., 2020). Digital Citizenship highlights the importance of digital literacy and security to reduce the risk of cybercrime (Mahmoudi-Dehaki & Nasr-Esfahani, 2025), as well as participation in political and social life in digital spaces (Ryland, 2018). In this context, education, as a preventive measure, is obligated to guide students to become responsible digital citizens (Fonseca & Bettencourt, 2020; Kim & Choi, 2018) through a pedagogical approach that permeates the overall educational practice (Iskandar et al., 2025; Komalasari et al., 2024).
Programmatically, Digital Citizenship is actualized in the DCE format. The Council of Europe defines DCE as an educational program that aims to provide every individual with the opportunity to master all citizenship competencies (Richardson & Milovidov, 2022) through a holistic approach (Webster, 2025). This approach is implemented to ensure that students acquire essential skills for navigating the digital world, such as critical thinking and empathy (Panjaburee et al., 2025; Pukallus & Arthur, 2024). Some learning practices implemented include findings indicating that teachers are teaching more about digital law, digital commerce, and digital security (E. K. Chong & Pao, 2021). In other situations, experiential learning is crucial for strengthening the competencies required for democratic participation (Barrett et al., 2018). To cultivate participatory citizens, Jones & Mitchell (2016) proposed a project-based digital citizenship curriculum to help students build skills and experience across various aspects of civic engagement.
The future of democratic life is greatly influenced by the extent to which both citizens and the government implement a democratic culture. Culture does not exist on its own; it requires a set of competencies as prerequisites. The Council of Europe (2021) developed a comprehensive CDC model comprising 20 competencies grouped into four clusters: values, attitudes, skills, knowledge, and critical understanding. In the realm of formal education, CDC is developed in the form of a reference framework, which is expected to be integrated into the curriculum, teacher education format, pedagogy, and assessment (Barrett et al., 2018; Council of Europe, 2021), so that it can be more effective for the purpose of strengthening CDC. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the CDC as a complex and systemic structure, both in the curriculum and in the cultural context within the school environment (Barrett et al., 2018; Iskandar et al., 2025; Jónsson & Rodriguez, 2021), which is outlined in the four domains of the CDC (Council of Europe, 2021). The values and attitudes domain emphasizes motivation to commit to human dignity, diversity, and democracy; the skills domain emphasizes practical skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, and conflict resolution; and the knowledge and critical understanding domain strengthens the ability to understand political institutions and procedures and to interpret social, cultural, and political issues responsibly (Barrett et al., 2018; Council of Europe, 2021).
The Council of Europe’s CDC document explicitly classifies 20 CDCs into 10 digital domains as the basis for the overall concept of Digital Citizenship. These ten domains are grouped into three core areas: online, well-being online, and rights online (Council of Europe, 2021). Within these 10 digital domains, DCE is developed by integrating values, attitudes, skills, knowledge, and critical understanding, and actualizing them holistically and comprehensively in the digital ecosystem ( Figure 1).
In the CDC framework, DCE is a pedagogical approach packaged as an instructional strategy to strengthen CDC in digital spaces. CDC refers to the democratic competencies that students must master, such as rights and obligations in the digital space, to enable them to participate effectively in democratic life while upholding human rights and intercultural understanding (Council of Europe, 2021; Richardson & Milovidov, 2022). Thus, the correlation between DCE and CDC is not limited to educational programs aimed at achieving the ultimate goal; rather, it is a causal relationship in which CDC serves as the basis for DC development and is implemented pedagogically and instructionally to strengthen CDC.
This study uses a bibliometric analysis method that combines performance analysis and science mapping (Bota-avram, 2023; Donthu et al., 2021), with the consideration that it can map the landscape of scientific data research in large quantities, both in terms of author productivity, citations, and country, trends, and significant themes developing at the intersection of studies (Bohara et al., 2024; Sulkipani et al., 2025; Yang et al., 2026), as is the case with DCE-CDC. The Scopus database was selected based on its ability to provide comprehensive, high-quality scientific research analysis supported by automated descriptive metrics and visualization tools (Saleh, Valentina, et al., 2025b; Wilsa et al., 2025).
Publications were tracked using Boolean techniques, with the main keywords DCE and CDC, along with their respective synonyms, in the format TITLE-ABS-KEY, followed by the DCE and CDC term groups. The first term represents DCE, such as “digital citizenship,” “digital citizen,” and “digital citizenship education. The second term uses 20 CDC indicators, as defined by the Council of Europe (2021). In this section, only examples of terms are shown for the sake of brevity, such as “rights and responsibilities,” “democracy,” “critical thinking,” “empathy,” “self-efficacy,” “digital ethics,” “privacy,” and “security,” etc. The two groups of terms are linked with AND, while synonyms within each group are linked with OR. No inclusion or exclusion parameters were applied to the search results, as the research objective was to comprehensively map the research landscape (Meiliati et al., 2026). The search results identified 219 publications; two documents lacked author names, so both were excluded, leaving a total of 217 publications for analysis.
Bibliometric analysis is a systematic analytical method that supports mapping and investigating the dynamics of development, progress patterns, and trends in scientific publications on a topic using large-scale data (Bozkurt et al., 2021; Li & Li, 2025; Orbe et al., 2024; Saleh, Saputra, et al., 2025a). Using VOSviewer and Bibliometrix, this study produced a bibliometric map of publication distribution by publication year, document type, author, and other factors, presented as a network visualization in thematic clusters (Basumatary et al., 2024; Ge et al., 2023; Yan & Wu, 2021; Zhao et al., 2023). Publish or perish was used to present general metrics from publication bibliographic data ( Table 1).
Documents by Year
Between 2008 and 2026, publications were relatively low in number until 2023, and then increased through 2025 ( Figure 2).
Figure 2 shows a relatively low distribution of publications in the first three years, with only one publication each. In 2011, there was an increase (n = 6), followed by fluctuations in the following years, with a stable trend until 2022. In 2023, a positive trend began to form, with 23 publications, and it continued to increase sharply in 2024 (n = 38), peaking in 2025 (n = 65), with an increase of almost three times that of 2023.
Documents by Type and Subject Area
Based on the type and subject area, the documents show a variety of types and subject areas ( Figure 3).
Figure 3 shows that articles dominate, with the largest percentage, namely 58.00%, followed by book chapters with 22.80%, conference papers with 13.20%, books with 2.30%, reviews with 1.80%, conference reviews with 0.90%, data papers with 0.50%, and finally type notes with 0.50%. Social science occupies the largest subject area with 40.20%, followed by computer science (19.60%), engineering (7.90%), business, management, and accounting (5.80%), psychology (5.60%), arts and humanities (4.00%), economics, econometrics, and finance (3.20%), medicine (2.60%), multidisciplinary (2.60%), decision sciences (2.40%), and other (6.10%).
Most Relevant Source
Based on the most relevant source category, documents were published in various sources. The following are the ten most relevant sources in the analyzed fields ( Figure 4).
A total of 63 sources contributed to the DCE-CDC research. As shown in Figure 4, publications were distributed across various sources, with Frontiers in Psychology emerging as the most productive. The relatively low number of publications among the leading sources indicates that DCE-CDC research remains scattered across publication venues and has not yet established a specific outlet that consistently accommodates DCE-CDC research.
Documents by Authors
An analysis of the author category shows the top 10 most productive and cited authors ( Figure 5). Among the top ten most productive authors, there was no significant difference in the number of publications (2–4 documents). However, among the top ten most-cited authors, there was a considerable difference in the number of publications.
The ten most productive authors were Rohman, H, with the most publications (n = 4), followed by Beauchere, J.F., Choi, M., Prasetiyo, W.H., Sari, B.I., Xu, S., and Zheng, Y., with three documents each, and the last three authors with two documents each, namely Adams, S., Akcil, U., and Azevedo, A. Furthermore, the ten most cited authors, with the highest number of citations being 292 by Choi, M, followed by Cristol, D. S (n = 284), Jones, L. M, and Mitchell, K. J, (n = 249 each), Glassman, M (n = 177), Citron, D. K, and Norton, H. I each with 170, then Hutson, E, Kelly, S. A, and Militello, L. K with 155, and finally Choi, D (n = 130). The document count by author indicates that productivity and citations are not always linear. This pattern indicates that productivity and citation impact are not always aligned; for example, examining them from different perspectives, across different countries, and through different analyses yields studies in new contexts. Simultaneously, citations play an important role in shaping the direction of DCE-CDC research because they influence the field of study, for example, the theoretical framework or research design that is widely referred to by subsequent studies.
Documents by Country
Over the past 18 years, the 10 countries with the highest number of publications and citations have also been the focus of this research. This analysis enriches the research landscape by revealing the United States as the dominant country in both categories ( Figure 6).
There is a striking difference in numbers between the top country and the second- to tenth-ranked countries in both categories. The United States consistently ranked as the country with the most publications (n = 40) and the highest number of citations (n = 1123). Turkey ranks second in both publications (n = 21) and citations (n = 159), but is quite far behind. Third, the most productive country was Spain (n = 12), while the highest citation country was South Korea (n = 144). These two categories also reveal that countries in Asia, Europe, and North America pay close attention to the DCE-CDC research landscape ( Figure 7).
Figure 7 shows the colors indicating the countries with the highest number of occurrences in the DCE-CDC documents. The light gray area indicates countries not included in the analyzed categories.
Documents by Citation Number
Analysis of documents with the highest number of citations places the top 10 countries that published in 2011–2024 ( Table 2).
In this category, Jones and Mitchell (2016) ranked first (n = 250), followed by Choi et al. (2017) with 178 citations, and Citron and Norton (2011) in third place. Cain (2024) ranked sixth, ranked highest on the FWCI criteria (n = 27.56).
Co-occurrence of All Keywords
Co-occurrence analysis using the all-keywords method was performed on 1,051 keywords with a minimum threshold of five occurrences. As a result, 38 terms met the threshold and were included in the network mapping. Examples of keywords in the five clusters, showing links (n = 238) and total link strength (n = 637), are listed in Table 3.
Table 3 shows the dominant themes, significant supporting themes, and specific subthemes that form the research trend map in DCE-CDC. This indicates the complexity and thematic diversity of the field; the topic is quite broad and rich, offering various perspectives and approaches. However, despite the established network, research on learning models remains rare, as indicated by the absence of this term from the network. In Figure 8, the learning field for the term “digital citizenship” is connected to only two terms: teaching (small node, distant) and e-learning (small node). However, when traced to the specific DCE term, the network is connected to only one learning term, namely e-learning (small node, distant), and surprisingly to only one CDC indicator, namely self-efficacy.
The network visualization shows that digital citizenship is a central term in the research landscape, connected to a limited number of CDC indicators: democracy, rights and responsibilities, and self-efficacy. There are 10 keywords with co-occurrence and total link strength: digital citizenship (n = 110:184), students (n = 16:61), citizenship (n = 14:63), teaching (n = 14:59), education (n = 14:39), Internet (n = 13:57), social media (n = 13:23), e-learning (n = 12:38), digital literacy (n = 12:28), and ethical technology (n = 11:32).
Co-occurrence by Title and Abstract
The co-occurrence analysis using the title-and-abstract method yielded 5,479 terms with a minimum threshold of ten occurrences. A total of 203 terms met the criteria, of which 122 were the most relevant for mapping in the network. This analysis produced six clusters, 3,287 links, and 24.885 total link strength ( Table 4).
Table 4 shows the clusters formed by the research trends. We reiterate that the terms “learning” and “assessment models” in the DCE-CDC landscape are important for designing learning programs and for assessing students’ CDC, thereby shaping citizens with democratic cultural competencies in the digital era. In Figure 9, the term “learning” (small node) is already connected to “citizenship” (a ubiquitous term that does not address digital aspects). However, when traced using the term ‘digital citizenship skill,’ there was no evidence of a network. This finding indicates limited attention to learning models in the DCE-CDC literature.
Co-occurrence analysis of titles and abstracts shows that “citizenship” has the highest occurrence rate (n = 422), followed by nine other terms, namely “education” (n = 168), “citizen” (n = 98), “information” (n = 80), “right” (n = 65), “child” (n = 58), “program” (n = 46), “cyberbullying” (n = 45), “self-efficacy” (n = 44), and “educator” (n = 41).
Directions for the Future Research Agenda
We complemented this research analysis by presenting overlay visualizations of both co-occurrence methods, namely, all keywords, title, and abstract ( Figure 10), as a strategic effort to navigate potential central themes in the future. The overlay visualization shows widely used new terms in research, with green-yellow and yellow nodes representing the current research.
Figure 10 shows the widely studied potential themes, including digital interaction, ethical behavior, the digital world, ethical implications, ethical technology, and engineering education. Similar to the all keywords method, the title and abstract method also shows central research themes concentrated in the realm of attitudes and several in other realms, namely attitude, digital ethics, critical thinking, TikTok, digital citizenship skills, privacy, higher education, cybersophy, digital responsibility, social media users, and digital empathy.
Research mapping that specifically examines digital citizenship in the context of education is rarely conducted, especially to strengthen the CDC. This study addresses a critical gap by providing a comprehensive mapping of DCE, which remains underexplored, particularly in terms of conceptual integration and pedagogical development. In the Scopus database, we identified only two research mapping studies on digital citizenship in the context of education: a study mapping 411 documents from 2010 to 2019 (Fernández-P et al., 2020) and another mapping 96 documents from 2010 to 2021 (Palaz et al., 2022). However, neither study comprehensively linked digital citizenship to CDC. Therefore, our study fills a gap in the previous research by offering a new perspective, emphasizing mapping in DCE-CDC, and highlighting the need for future research. This reveals both the limited volume of DCE-CDC research and the absence of structured instructional models. This is a strategic recommendation to support students’ democratic culture skills in the digital space, which is highly relevant in the global context (Council of Europe, 2021; Richardson & Milovidov, 2022).
In general, the DCE-CDC research trend from 2008 to 2026 shows a stable year-over-year increase, although from 2009 to 2022, there was no significant increase. A positive trend occurred in 2023–2025 with an almost three-fold increase since the first surge in 2023. This confirms the high level of interest among researchers in the DCE-CDC field. There has been no significant decline in the numbers, and the upward trend continues. This trend indicates that DCE-CDC research is gaining increasing scholarly attention, in line with the rapid increase in public access to digital resources (Schulz et al., 2023; Sincar, 2012b; Yildiz et al., 2020). Although not significant, the fact that no year has had zero publications indicates that this field remains increasingly relevant to contemporary educational research (Iskandar et al., 2025; Jónsson & Rodriguez, 2021).
Articles are the most common type of DCE-CDC document, indicating that this format is the most influential in conveying the latest scientific knowledge to the public. Furthermore, various subject areas accommodate DCE-CDC documents, with most in the social sciences (Rahimi, 2016; Sleem & Nicolas, 2025) and other disciplines. This finding confirms that the DCE-CDC research landscape spans multiple disciplines and perspectives (Ning, 2025; Pucelj & Bohinc, 2024; Schallegger, 2019). However, despite the need to strengthen CDC through DCE, this field currently lacks specific, focused sources and journals that consistently publish content. Although Frontiers in Psychology emerged as the most productive source, it contributed only four publications, while the remaining leading sources contributed two publications. This pattern indicates that DCE-CDC research is dispersed across numerous publication outlets rather than being concentrated within a specific journal. The absence of a dominant source suggests that the field has not yet established a consolidated publication outlet that consistently accommodates DCE-CDC research (Council of Europe, 2021; Ribble & Bailey, 2007; Richardson & Milovidov, 2022).
Notably, the article by Jones & Mitchell (2016) has the highest number of citations and was published in the journal New Media & Society. This study reveals the conceptual breadth of digital citizenship, which complicates the design of targeted educational interventions. This study has implications for the development and evaluation of DCE programs, providing a strategic foundation for future DCE learning and assessment models that strengthen the CDC. This aligns with previous research emphasizing the need for more comprehensive educational strategies to shape active, ethical, and responsible citizenry (Iskandar et al., 2025). Another interesting point in this analysis is the publication by Cain (2024), which ranks sixth in citations but has the highest FWCI. This indicates an extraordinary citation impact compared to the standard benchmark for DCE-CDC research. This article emphasizes that digital citizenship is a key competency for using Large Language Model AI through prompt engineering in a critical, ethical, and responsible manner. These findings underscore the importance of future research on DCE as an instructional strategy for strengthening CDC. According to Al-Otaibi (2025), it is important to develop academic curricula that explain how to coexist with culturally diverse communities and raise awareness of digital cultures.
Next, co-occurrence analysis using the All Keywords and Title and Abstract methods shows that the dominant research themes are the terms digital citizenship and citizenship, which are connected to a small portion of CDC indicators, such as democracy (Biagi & Bracci, 2022), rights and responsibilities (Pierantoni, 2024), and self-efficacy (Warraich et al., 2025). The term DCE was only weakly connected to a limited number of CDC indicators, namely self-efficacy, with a distant connection and a small node. Existing studies are limited to correlations between DCE and CE and CDC indicators in a scattered, partial manner, and the complete terms CDC or RFCDC are not found in the network. This indicates that the integration between DCE and CDC remains limited and fragmented, and even within the practical instructional realm, DCE has not yet become a serious concern for educational institutions. In the learning field, the network is connected only to the terms “teaching” (Trixa & Kaspar, 2024) and “e-learning” (Cartelli, 2008). In contrast, the terms “learning” and “assessment models,” as umbrella terms for learning practices, do not appear at all. The absence of learning and assessment models reveals a critical gap between conceptual discourse and pedagogical implementation (Barrett et al., 2018; Council of Europe, 2021; Richardson & Milovidov, 2022).
Furthermore, terms in the domain of attitudes dominate (and some in other domains) as themes that are currently being widely researched and still have potential for future study, namely attitude (Rasul & Shin, 2025), digital empathy (Al-Qallaf, 2025), digital responsibility (Hill, 2017), social media user (Ismail et al., 2025), critical thinking (Silor & Silor, 2025), educational institution (Hanewald, 2013), and several other terms appear in the green-yellow and yellow clusters in the overlay visualization, indicating that recent research still tends to focus on the partial relationship between DCE and CDC indicators, and that comprehensive CDC reinforcement and DCE learning model design have not yet been demonstrated in the network. These findings underscore the need to develop integrated instructional models (Council of Europe, 2021; Richardson & Milovidov, 2022). This gap highlights the urgent need for coherent instructional approaches that integrate DCE and CDC.
DCE-CDC publications are still relatively limited, especially regarding terms that frequently appear in co-occurrence analysis across all methods, such as digital citizenship and citizenship. The specific term DCE appeared only eight times in the research dataset over the last 18 years, indicating that research on digital citizenship in education remains rare, and unfortunately, DCE in the realm of learning models for instructional purposes and assessment as a comprehensive effort to measure the achievement of educational goals has not been found in the network. Learning models and assessment are a broad framework that plays a strategic role in achieving learning objectives. In relation to the CDC, digital citizenship has been discussed using several terms in the CDC indicators, but the pattern is still limited, scattered, and partial. Even for the specific term DCE, the research is only connected to one CDC indicator: self-efficacy. These findings indicate that DCE for CDC purposes has not yet received serious and comprehensive attention. This study not only maps DCE-CDC research but also provides important contributions to researchers and institutions seeking to develop DCE learning models for comprehensive CDC strengthening, in particular, and for in-depth clinical investigation and exploration to further research on DCE-CDC in general.
This study has two limitations: (1) the database used for publication searches was limited to Scopus, so potential publications from other databases were not included in the analysis, and (2) publication searches were limited to the keyword DCE and several relevant synonyms and terms that only refer to the CDC and its 20 indicators, so that publications using other keywords such as digital democracy and online civic engagement were not analyzed. We recommend expanding the search database to be more diverse and adding the terms digital democracy’ and ‘online civic engagement’ to obtain a more comprehensive analysis.
Ethical approval and consent were not required.
Repository name: A Bibliometric Analysis of Digital Citizenship Education and Competences for Democratic Culture: Global Trends, Knowledge Structure, and Future Research Agenda. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21403538. [Komalasari, K (2026)].
This project contains the following underlying data:
• 01_Search Strategy (Scopus Boolean Query).docx.docx: Contains the search strategy (Boolean search query) used to identify publications on Digital Citizenship Education (DCE) and Competences for Democratic Culture (CDC) in the Scopus database. This file documents all keywords and Boolean operators used during the data search process
• 02_Scopus Dataset (Raw, 219 Records).csv.csv: Contains a raw dataset exported from the Scopus database, consisting of 219 documents based on search results using a predefined Boolean strategy. This dataset includes complete bibliographic metadata, such as title, author, abstract, keywords, affiliation, publication source, citations, DOI, and other bibliographic information, which serves as the basis for the filtering process and bibliometric analysis.
• 03_Scopus Dataset (Cleaned, 217 Records).csv.csv: Contains a cleaned dataset consisting of 217 documents. Two documents were excluded because the author name metadata was incomplete, meaning they did not meet the requirements for bibliometric analysis. This dataset was used as the final dataset throughout the entire analysis process using VOSviewer and Bibliometrix, except title–abstract co-occurrence analysis)
• 04_Scopus Data for Co-occurrence Analysis (RIS Format).ris.ris: Contains a cleaned dataset consisting of 217 documents. Two documents were excluded because the author name metadata was incomplete, meaning they did not meet the requirements for bibliometric analysis. This dataset was used as the final dataset throughout the entire analysis process using VOSviewer and Bibliometrix to construct the title–abstract knowledge structure network)
• 05_VOSviewer Thesaurus File.txt.txt: Contains the thesaurus file used in VOSviewer to standardize terms with variations in spelling or plural forms, resulting in a more consistent and accurate bibliometric map.
The data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY 4.0).
No extended data are associated with this article.
We would like to thank The Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP) on behalf of The Indonesian Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology and managed under the EQUITY Program (Contract No. 4314/B3/DT.03.08/2025 and No. 352/UN40/HK.00.10/2025) for facilitating the funding of this research.
This research was supported by The Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP) on behalf of The Indonesian Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology and managed under the EQUITY Program [Contract No. 4314/B3/DT.03.08/2025 and No. 352/UN40/HK.00.10/2025].
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
© 2026 Komalasari K et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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