A retrospective look at the research on dyscalculia from a bibliometric approach

Abstract

Dyscalculia is a learning disorder that affects the correct acquisition of arithmetic skills and significantly influences both the daily life of students and their academic success. Being a disorder with an estimated prevalence between 2.27% and 6.4%, it has received much less attention than others, such as dyslexia or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This study, based on a methodological design of the mapping of science and from a bibliometric approach, allows for the visualization of the scientific literature on dyscalculia present in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases, dimensioning the research carried out from the moment the term dyscalculia was used for the first time to the present and analyzing the evolution of scientific literature on this subject and how it has been organized and structured. The collected publications have been analyzed with the support of the VOSviewer program and a bibliographic coupling analysis between countries has been carried out as well as word co-occurrence analysis and the citation of sources and publications. Results indicate that over the past few years, the scientific community has shown a growing interest in in dyscalculia, strongly localized in a small group of countries, and a predominance of contributions focused on understanding the disorder and in its diagnosis, yet there is still a great need for research that provides solid evidence for educational intervention aimed at the full inclusion of students with dyscalculia, beyond proposals for the design of support resources, especially technological ones.

Key words: bibliometrics, scientific production, dyscalculia, learning difficulty, mathematics education, learning disability.