Bibliographic Analysis of Research on ‘Online Higher Education’ Worldwide: WoS Articles (2005–2025)

This study examines the status of Online Higher Education studies in the literature between 2005 and 2025 by using the Web of Science database with bibliometric analysis methods. We analyzed 346 articles obtained from the WOS database, which contain qualified publications in the field of Online Higher Education and which were obtained as a result of certain constraints. In this study, the VOS viewer, a popular tool, and the Topic Model Approach were used as bibliometric mapping tools. The main contribution of this research to the field is that it is up-to-date research that maps the studies conducted in the context of Higher Education on Online education, which is one of the decentralized educational activities whose use has increased after the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the data obtained in the study, co-authorship ties revealing the relationship between the authors, citation analysis of prominent authors, citation analysis of countries showing the distribution of the phenomenon on the world geography, citation analysis of the leading institutions in the field of higher education in the world and citation ties between them, keyword analysis and word ties, and bibliometric match analysis of texts and authors. This study provides a comprehensive and holistic assessment of online higher education, which can be considered as the educational model of the future. The study findings were used to analyze the basic structural trends, similarities and differences in the field of online higher education and to develop solution-oriented suggestions by identifying unique and dominant issues under 19 thematic headings.