A Bibliometric Study of Student Success in Higher Education

The purpose of this study was to examine international research trends with respect to student success in the field of higher education. In order to address the study’s purpose, we collected scholarly articles that addressed issues and topics concerning student success published between 1974 and 2023. This study employed bibliometric analysis targeted towards bibliometric information of a total of 615 articles housed in SSCI- and Scopus-indexed journals. The information was extracted from the Web of Science, a web database powered by Clarivate Analytics. For data analysis, we utilized the bibliometrix package in RStudio. The study’s findings show that the quantity of articles on student success has increased since the late 2000s, especially surging since the mid-2010s. The majority of these investigations were conducted in Western countries, predominantly the United States, and international collaboration was scarce. Through the frequency analysis of co-citation data, author, and key terms, it was revealed that the foundational underpinnings of student success have been rooted in the concepts of student retention and student engagement. According to the results of keyword co-occurrence network analysis, we categorized sub-themes into five clusters: (a) teaching and learning assessments within online environments, (b) institutional support and empirical approaches for student retention, (c) psychological and emotional aspects responding to student crisis, (d) student engagement and experience-based student-oriented perspectives, and (e) associations with adult education and career development in community colleges. Finally, the study’s findings from thematic analysis demonstrate that research on student success has emerged based on inter- and intra-collaborations within and across various domains of studies. Based on the findings, academic and practical implications are suggested for research and practice in South Korea’s higher education context.