Three Decades of Apprenticeship Research (1995-2025): a Descriptive Bibliometric and Thematic Mapping
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This paper provides a descriptive bibliometric and thematic mapping of a 105 source apprenticeship literature corpus compiled during doctoral research on the effectiveness of India's National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS) within the retail sector. While a companion paper evaluates how the thematic clusters within this corpus evolved chronologically, this study treats the collection as a single, cross sectional population to assess macro level structural properties. Specifically, it examines temporal publication growth, journal concentration, geographic distribution, author productivity, research design prevalence, and overall thematic composition. Five primary structural findings emerge. First, the field exhibits a notable seventeen year publication gap between 1996 and 2013, followed by an accelerating trajectory consistent with an emerging rather than a fully mature research domain. Second, journal output is highly fragmented: 77 sources appear across 58 distinct outlets, with only three journals contributing more than three articles each. Third, empirical focus is geographically bimodal, concentrated heavily in Western Europe and India, with sparse representation elsewhere. Fourth, authorship is highly dispersed; only five first author or institutional entities appear more than once. Fifth, over a third of the sources do not specify a conventional, named research design, methodological transparency gap concentrated primarily within grey literature and institutional reports. Synthesized, these indicators describe a young, fragmented, and geographically bimodal field lacking a unified methodological core precisely the conditions under which a rigorous, empirical study of India’s retail apprenticeship sector can make a high impact foundational contribution.
Author: Santosh Kumar Mohapatra
Institution: Poornima University
Language: English
Subfield: Library and Information Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7170466039