School Landscape Affordances in Physical Education and Adventure Education: A Bibliometric Analysis
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Background. The literature on school outdoor environments spans research on physical activity, health, and education. Adventure education and the concepts of competence and physical literacy are subthemes that need to be mapped without treating them as requirements for all documents. Objectives. To map publication output, citations, contributors, the co-occurrence structure of author keywords, and differences in keyword representation across periods in the literature retrieved using a search strategy on school environments and movement activities. Materials and Methods. The study employed a descriptive bibliometric design. The Scopus export dated September 6, 2026, contained 289 English-language records published between 2017 and 2026. Two records labeled Retracted, two Erratum records, and one record with a duplicate DOI were excluded, yielding an analytical corpus of 284 documents. The main network used normalized author keywords, full counting, and a threshold of five documents. The temporal comparison used document counts and proportions for 2017–2021 and 2022–2026. Results. The documents were distributed across 182 sources, with a mean of 15.01 citations per document. Publication output peaked in 2022 and 2025, with 38 documents each; the 2019 publication cohort had the highest mean citation count, at 33.64. The United States had the greatest representation based on affiliation countries. The author keyword network comprised 33 nodes and 187 links. Physical activity was recorded in 78 documents (27.46%). The proportion of documents using the keyword physical education increased from 1.69% to 7.83%, outdoor education from 1.69% to 4.22%, and natural environment from 5.08% to 8.43%. Motor competence and physical literacy were recorded in three and two documents, respectively. Conclusions. The retrieved corpus represents physical activity more frequently than pedagogical and competence-related keywords. Several pedagogical terms had higher proportions in the second period. These findings describe terminological representation within the corpus rather than intervention effectiveness, the origins of themes, or the absence of relevant research.
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $200
OpenAlex ID: W7225224694