Professional identity: A bibliometric analysis and field mapping

Professional identity has captured the interest of researchers because of its impact on career development, career progression, professionalism, ethics and workplace dynamics. This article reviews the literature on professional identity, aiming to offer coherence and precision to a vast, dispersed collection of literature concerning professional identity. Using 11,199 publications from the Scopus database, we performed a bibliometric analysis via Excel 2019 to identify the year of research initiation, type of research document, significant research areas, key topics, influential authors, citation counts and H indices of the top authors, relevant journals, and impact factors (IFs) of the top journals and countries responsible for most professional identity research. In addition, VOSviewer software was used to map the intellectual landscape by identifying the relationships between cited references and authors and finding recurring themes and innovative ideas in the chosen dataset. The review revealed that research on professional identity has grown profoundly since the 1950s, with a significant increase in annual document publications since 2005, reaching a record high of 1065 publications in 2022 and 1218 in 2023. The social science area has produced the highest number of publications (7114 publications, 42.8%). BMC Medical Education has published the most documents (143 publications). The United States of America has published the most documents (3138 publications). Visualizing network mapping of cocitations of references and authors and co-occurrence of keywords related to professional identity represented how different concepts and themes are interconnected within the field, highlighting influential authors, significant publications, and key focus areas and guiding future research directions.

Citation

Panda, M. C., Kar, B., Kar, N., & Alhussam, M. A. (2025) Professional identity: A bibliometric analysis and field mapping. Multidisciplinary Reviews, 9(1), 2026030. https://doi.org/10.31893/multirev.2026030

Type

Journal article

Language

en

Description

ISSN

2595-3982

Collections

Faculty of Science and Engineering