Mindfulness in higher education: a bibliometric analysis of one hundred years of research and agenda for the coming years
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26439/ddee2026.n009.8821Keywords:
mindfulness, higher education, bibliometric analysis, university mental healthAbstract
Bibliometric studies on scientific production in the field of mindfulness or full attention are scarce and limited to narrow time windows. This paper presents the first international bibliometric analysis of scientific production with 4,399 documents on mindfulness in higher education indexed in Scopus, covering the 1916-2021 period. VOSviewer was used for the analysis of citation networks. The results evidence an exponential growth in production, with 49.47% of the documents concentrated between 2017 and 2022. The United States leads the production (43.32%) and English dominates the corpus (96.93%). The journal Mindfulness concentrates 10.53% of the publications (Q1; SJR 1.509). The most cited articles were published between 2003 and 2011, revealing that recent growth has not generated an equivalent second generation of foundational works. The dominant thematic cluster articulates student mental health (stress, anxiety, well-being), while areas such as educational technology and teacher well-being register notable expansion. Geographical, methodological, and linguistic gaps are identified that shape the research agenda for the coming years, with priority on the cross-cultural adaptation of protocols for the Global South.
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