Research on teacher digital competence has expanded sharply over the past decade. However, the field’s development, thematic structure, and underlying terminological characteristics have remained under-examined. The rapid integration of artificial intelligence has compounded this challenge, introducing new competence-related constructs and reshaping the field’s conceptual landscape. In the context of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets 4.4 (developing digital skills) and 4.c (ensuring a supply of qualified teachers), this raises the question of whether the knowledge base is developing coherently. To address this question, we analyse a corpus of 4097 Scopus-indexed publications retrieved through a broad search on teacher digital competence, published between 2015 and 2025, using longitudinal bibliometric analysis and science mapping. The analysis reveals marked terminological variability: a high Pielou’s evenness index (J′ = 0.86) indicates that occurrences are distributed relatively evenly across 8567 normalised terms, suggesting the absence of a strongly dominant terminological core at the corpus level, while singleton terms account for a large share of the vocabulary (76%), pointing to substantial fragmentation. Against this fragmented backdrop, an AI-oriented strand accounts for 10.4% of the corpus and rises to 26.1% of annual output by 2025; rather than displacing established competence-related concepts, AI-related concepts form an emerging technological layer within teacher digital competence research. These thematic patterns are accompanied by uneven publication activity and international collaboration. Taken together, these findings indicate that the conceptual boundaries of teacher digital competence research are shaped by substantial terminological variability and ongoing thematic expansion. They further highlight the importance of transparent search strategies and greater terminological clarity and consistency for improving the comparability, reproducibility, and cumulative development of research in this field.
Amid the ongoing digital transformation of education, research on teacher digital competence has become an established and rapidly growing area within educational technology. This growth reflects the increasing importance of teachers’ digital competence for supporting technology-enhanced teaching and for advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG Targets 4.4 and 4.c). Recent bibliometric and systematic reviews confirm both the momentum and the scale of this research
[1][2][1,2]: reviews of educational technology and of digital competence in higher education have identified teachers’ preparedness to use digital technologies as one of the field’s most frequently investigated themes
[3][4][3,4], and the accumulated body of work has grown large enough to warrant systematic empirical mapping in its own right.
The scope of the field has widened considerably over the past decade. Research on teacher digital competence is no longer confined to the operational digital skills of individual teachers; it increasingly addresses the broader professional and pedagogical dimensions of competence. Studies have examined the strategies through which pre-service teachers are prepared to integrate technology
[5][6][5,6], the formation of teachers’ professional digital identity
[7], and pedagogical digital competence as a distinct construct linking technological and didactic knowledge
[8]. More recent work frames teacher digital competence as an inherently multidimensional construct, encompassing not only technical proficiency but also professional, ethical, and context-dependent capacities
[9][10][9,10]. This conceptual widening is significant: as the boundaries of the field expand, so too does the range of terminology used to describe it.
This expansion has been accompanied by a proliferation of conceptual frameworks. The literature draws on the European Digital Competence Framework for Educators (DigCompEdu), the Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (DigComp), the UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (ICT-CFT), and the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework, among others, each emphasising different dimensions of teachers’ digital competence
[11][12][13][14][15][16][11,12,13,14,15,16]. Alongside these frameworks, the field employs a wide range of overlapping labels (digital competence, digital literacy, digital skills, and ICT competence) that are not always used consistently. Reviews have repeatedly identified this conceptual and terminological diversity as a persistent feature of the literature: the same educational phenomena are frequently described under competing designations, with no shared definition across studies
[17][18][19][17,18,19]. This terminological variability is more than a semantic inconvenience; it directly shapes how the literature can be retrieved, mapped, and compared
[20][21][20,21].
A substantial body of review and bibliometric research has already mapped this literature from complementary perspectives. Systematic reviews have synthesised competence frameworks, assessment instruments, and approaches to teacher professional development
[4][22][4,22], while bibliometric studies have charted publication trends, collaboration networks, citation structures, and thematic evolution
[3][23][3,23]. Together, these syntheses have mapped the field’s established thematic structure, publication landscape, and principal lines of research.
What remains largely unexamined, however, is the empirical delineation of the field’s conceptual boundaries. Existing syntheses predominantly take these boundaries as a given, focusing on what the corpus contains rather than on how its conceptual core can be distinguished from adjacent research traditions that share terminology. Yet, terminological variability carries direct methodological consequences for corpus construction, record retrieval, and science mapping: when a single construct appears under multiple competing labels, and a single label spans distinct constructs, field boundaries become an empirical question rather than an assumption. The present study addresses this gap through a deliberately broad retrieval strategy and bibliometric network analysis, guided by the following research questions:
RQ1: How did the conceptual structure of research on teacher digital competence evolve across three analytically defined phases between 2015 and 2025, and how has the emergence of AI-related competence constructs been reflected in this evolution?
RQ2: To what extent does terminological variability affect bibliometric retrieval, mapping, and the comparability of studies on teacher digital competence?
RQ3: How do international collaboration patterns vary across countries within the research field of teacher digital competence?
