Rethinking Educational Administration Studies in the Past Two Decades: Lessons for the future

Every discipline is dynamic and alive to its scientific identity, and educational administration has had many successes and failures over a century, like other academic disciplines in its ups and downs.
A review of historical events in this field suggests that there has been a great deal of effort in the history of educational administration thought to escape intellectual disarray. However, the uncertainty of the field of educational administration is evident in the fluctuations of theories in this field and its combination with other fields of management, many of which may have been based on positivist assumptions. Accordingly, a dominant view, educational administration, has over a century of experience and rich theoretical and epistemological foundations. To what extent we have this knowledge store and what has been introduced into our country as educational administration science, to what extent has the necessary scientific justification, justification and proportionate to social and cultural contexts been achieved and to what extent has it been effective? And to be expected in the scientific and developmental currents, are challenging questions to consider. The historical overview of educational administration developments can be plotted in a variety of categories.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the trend of studies and researches in educational administration. Accordingly, important variables such as the extent and process of scientific production, the identification of authors, collaborative research, co-authoring, journals, universities, important and prominent keywords, in the field of Educational Administration , were measured using the Vosviewer software. the outline of this software, is the scientific communication network. This study examines various studies of Educational Administration over the last 20 years (2000–2019) indexed in the Scopus database. Following the assumptions of the bibliometric method, the present study was conducted in the first part of social network analysis and in the second part of the type of citation analysis using Vosviewer software. Accordingly, this study is one of the integrated studies.
As stated, In order to delineate the scientific web of Educational Administration, the data and information of articles published in the Scopus citation database during the years 2000 to 2019 (the last 20 years) were selected. Searching for the Scopus Database by Keyword educational administration, October 12, 2019. After a preliminary search and review of the articles, records specifically related to educational administration were broken down. After separating out-of-field articles, 1349 records were finally analyzed and analyzed. In other words, the sample size of the study consisted of 1349 articles indexed between 2000 and 2019 on educational administration in the Scopus database. One of the most popular social network analysis software called Vosviewer was used to analyze the data and recognize the relationships and interactions of different variables used in the research. For this purpose, the bibliometric information of 1349 records was extracted after extraction and analyzed by social network analysis on the tables and forms considered as software output. In the second part, the results of this analysis are described in full in the vertical citation analysis method.
In this study, first, to investigate the process of educational administration from 2000 to 2019, the researcher sought to examine the temporal trend of research conducted during the last 20 years. In other words, it became clear in this step how many articles have been published in this field over the past 20 years. In the following, the types of documents that put the concept of educational administration into consideration were given separately and the most cited publications in this field were introduced. The most important partner countries in producing articles related to the concept of educational administration were also identified. Finally, it has been delineated and analyzed into the scientific conceptualization of educational administration.
The findings of the study showed that according to the place of publication with the highest number of citations and most cited articles, the US ranked first in the world followed by China, Canada and Australia. According to the publication reference, the most cited journals belong to the American Journal of educational administration, the Journal of educational administration, and the Journal of Leadership Education Research, respectively. Among the keywords used in the research, the concept of educational administration mainly applies to the concepts of leadership, training and Administration . The analytical findings also showed that the concept of educational administration has a wide range of related concepts and its breadth and diversity can be contemplated. Such an extension can be attributed to the breadth of topics studied in the field and in some cases due to its lack of focus on its particular specialized concepts.
Regarding network analysis, which illustrates the subjective diversity of specialized knowledge of educational administration, it can be said that existing diversity can be an opportunity or threat for the development of any discipline. The opportunity to be considered as a subjective diversity of educational administration knowledge thus encompasses the three levels of macro (educational policy), intermediate (management of educational and non-educational organizations) and micro (school management), indicating the special importance and applicability of educational administration knowledge. On this basis, it can be said that the development of educational administration. knowledge can lead to dramatic changes in all Educational systems as well as society and industry, and this is a reciprocal achievement for the theoretical development of educational administration knowledge. On the other hand, the possible divergence of some scholars from the domain of specialized discipline and the move towards what may not be directly related to Educational Administration knowledge is a threat to the subjective diversity of studies in educational administration.
In addition to revealing the growth of this knowledge, the scientific network of educational administration can guide the direction of researchers in this field. A limitation of this study was the limitation of using Vosviewer software for internal databases. It is hoped that the findings of the present study and other related research in educational administration will be a way to overcome this specialized knowledge and help to solve the problems ahead.