LEADERSHIP IN EDUCATION: COMPARATIVE BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS

The research on educational leadership has received significant attention over more than halfa century, resulting in an abundant literature on this topic. A series of studies and research have revealed that educational leadership is an extremely complex and important phenomenon. Despite this, there is a gap in the specialized literature regarding the presentation of this knowledge through a bibliometric analysis. The present study aims to provide an overall image of the evolution of this concept by identifying articles published in indexed journals in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) and Scopus. The search was conducted using the terms: "educational leadership, leadership in education, school leadership, professor leader." The search yielded a total of 3089 articles in WoS and 2723 articles in Scopus, with the oldest article dated back to 1946 and the most recent published in Scopus on April 12, 2024. The research represents a comparative view of the two databases, addressing the general profile of articles, the annual distribution of article frequencies, the most productive researchers, the most influential articles in terms of the number of citations, and a hierarchical ranking of articles according to the countries and journals in which they were published. The contribution of the research lies in the use of systematic methods for performing a complex bibliometric analysis on the topic of educational leadership. In this sense, certain collaboration models between authors, universities, and countries in the two databases are presented and analyzed. The conclusions provide important information for researchers regarding the detailed evolution of educational leadership through the existing literature. Starting from the study of the most influential articles, the main research directions of authors over approximately 80 years were identified, as well as the existing gaps in this field, both conceptually and empirically.