Research Trends on Math Anxiety in Mathematics Education: A Bibliometric Analysis

Source abstract

This study analyzes trends, thematic focus, and global contributions in scientific publications on mathematics anxiety in mathematics education through a bibliometric approach to 64 articles indexed in Scopus between 1994 and 2025. Data were obtained using the keywords (“mathematics anxiety”) AND (“mathematics education” OR “math education” OR “math teaching”) with restrictions on journal articles to maintain data relevance and quality. The analysis was performed using RStudio software with the bibliometrix package. The results show a rapid increase in publications since 2016, peaking in 2020–2021. The bibliometric analysis techniques used consisted of performance analysis and science mapping, including co-word analysis. The thematic focus was dominated by keywords such as “anxiety,” “mathematics,” “female,” “male,” “adolescent,” and “child,” reflecting significant attention to the age, gender, and anxiety levels of students. International collaboration reached 20.31%, with Frontiers in Psychology as the most productive journal. These findings make an important contribution to the development of more inclusive and emotionally responsive mathematics research and learning strategies.