A systematic review on citizenship education in social studies

The scope of the social studies course, which aims to educate individuals seeking solutions to national and universal issues, is quite broad and complex. Therefore, social studies researchers have many topics and accumulate significant knowledge. This case necessitates examining and organizing primary research in the literature, identifying topic trends, and determining the gaps in the literature. Research review methods, which refer to secondary research, should be utilized to address this need. This study aims to describe and reflect the general status of citizenship education research in the context of social studies quantitatively. The systematic literature review method was employed in line with the defined purpose. The data sources for the research consist of articles obtained from WoS, Scopus, and TR Index databases through document analysis. Content analysis was used to determine the characteristics of the obtained articles, while bibliometric analysis was employed to examine their general, conceptual, and intellectual structure. In the research, which included 195 articles from the Scopus database, 14 from the WoS database, and 50 from the TR Index database, some results were obtained per the review criteria. The results of the content analysis of the research indicate that the majority of the publications were published in 2021; the journal that contributed the most to the literature was "Theory & Research in Social Education," the author who contributed the most was "Jasmine B. Y. Sim," the articles were primarily aimed at revealing perceptions/thoughts/beliefs/experiences related to citizenship/citizenship education, the most discussed type of citizenship was global citizenship, qualitative methods were predominantly used in the research methods, the most common research design was the case study method, teachers were the most common sample type, data were primarily collected through interviews, and content analysis was the most frequently used analysis method. In the bibliometric analysis results of 195 articles included from the Scopus database of the study, According to Lotka's Law, the level of interest of the authors in the research on citizenship is limited, the impact value of the journal "Theory and Research in Social Education" is the highest, the concept of "civics" has been the subject of research for a long time, and the most cited source among the articles in the joint citation analysis is Westheimer and Kahne's (2004) "What kind of citizen? the politics of educating for democracy" and the most cited article is Myers (2006). The research results emphasize the importance of quality rather than the number of scientific publications. At the same time, the research results show that the characteristics, conceptual and intellectual structures of the existing studies in the literature can be revealed by an effective systematic review method. At the end of the review process, a road map is presented for researchers who want to research citizenship in social studies education with the clear and rigorous methods provided by the systematic review method.