Açık Alan Eğitimleri Alanında Yapılan Çalışmaların Eğitim ve Spor Bilimleri Açısından Bibliometrik İncelenmesi

This study presents a bibliometric analysis of academic publications on outdoor education. Outdoor education is defined as an interdisciplinary method that occurs in out-of-classroom environments, is based on experiential learning, and engages all the senses. The research scanned studies conducted using the keyword 'outdoor education' in the Web of Science Core Collection database up to December 14, 2025, and identified 1,232 documents. 701 studies in the fields of education and sports sciences were analyzed; it was found that the majority of them were published as articles and in English. The analyses conducted with the VOSviewer program revealed that Beames S. is the most prolific author, the University of Edinburgh is the institution with the highest number of publications, and the United States is the country with the most publications. In recent years, Finland, Norway, Spain, and Croatia have been observed to play an active role in studies on the subject. Keyword analysis has shown that research in recent years has shifted towards the fields of 'primary education', 'early childhood', 'children', 'teachers', and 'technology'. The Journal of Adventure Education was the journal with the most publications, while Morris's (2020) study on the experiential learning model received 539 citations, making it the most cited publication. This bibliometric analysis indicates that there has been increasing academic interest in the field of outdoor education in recent years and that research has particularly focused on early childhood, primary education, and technology integration. The increase in international collaborations and interdisciplinary studies demonstrates that outdoor education is gaining an increasingly important place on the global education agenda.