Re-Mapping Teacher Mentoring in Dynamic and Challenging Educational Contexts: A Longitudinal Bibliometric Landscape Analysis (2010–2025)

Abstract

Mentoring has become a central mechanism of teacher support and professional learning, while the conditions of teaching have been reshaped by socio-political uncertainty, teacher shortages, digitalisation, increasingly diverse student needs, and the COVID-19 pandemic itself. This study aimed to map the conceptual structure and temporal evolution of research on teacher mentoring and professional learning. A longitudinal bibliometric and science-mapping analysis was conducted on 2843 peer-reviewed articles indexed in the Scopus database and published between 2010 and 2025, using co-occurrence (co-word) analysis of author and indexed keywords in VOSviewer 1.6.20, complemented by network, overlay and density visualisations. The final co-word map comprised 123 keyword elements organised into four clusters, with 3312 links and a total link strength of 17,024. The central node was ‘mentoring’ (532 occurrences; 121 links; total link strength = 2212; average publication year = 2019.40). Four thematic lines structured the discourse: (1) professionalisation in the wider sense, including health education mentoring; (2) initial teacher education and the induction of new teachers; (3) higher education and digitally mediated environments of professional learning; and (4) bridging concepts of collaboration and professional identity formation. The findings indicate that, within the literature mapped, mentoring functions as a relational, context-sensitive form of support connecting several arenas of professional learning. This study contributes a longitudinal conceptual map of the field; the results describe the intellectual structure of the literature and do not constitute evidence of the effectiveness of mentoring practices.