Governing Rural and Remote Teacher Workforces: A Bibliometric Analysis of Distribution, Recruitment, and Retention Research
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62951/ijss.v3i3.721Keywords:
Bibliometric Analysis, Remote Schools, Rural Teachers, Teacher Distribution, Teacher RetentionAbstract
Rural and remote school systems face persistent difficulty distributing and retaining qualified teachers, yet the knowledge base remains dispersed across education policy, labor-market, and organizational research. This study maps the development, social structure, conceptual organization, and intellectual foundations of rural and remote teacher-workforce research and interprets their implications for public-service workforce governance. The systematically screened corpus comprised 478 Scopus-indexed articles and reviews published between 1957 and 2026 and retrieved on 4 August 2026. Performance analysis and thematic evolution were conducted with bibliometrix/Biblioshiny, while network mapping used VOSviewer 1.6.21. Publication output accelerated after 2019, which accounted for 70.3% of the corpus, but international co-authorship remained limited at 10.67%. The final author-keyword map contained 38 terms in six clusters, while title-abstract analysis retained 43 terms in five clusters. Both converged on distribution, shortages, recruitment, turnover, attrition, incentives, leadership, professional development, and equity. The recurrent co-authorship network was small, whereas co-citation analysis revealed a shared intellectual base centered on organizational and labor-market explanations of workforce instability. The thematic shift from recruitment toward distribution and from equity toward retention indicates that rural staffing is increasingly understood as a connected governance cycle. The study proposes an integrated framework linking workforce intelligence, preparation, allocation, workplace support, mobility, and retention, with equity as a cross-cutting outcome.
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