A Bibliometric Analysis of Virtual Mobility: An Emerging Approach to Internationalisation of Education

With the development of information and communication technology, virtual mobility, as an approach to internationalising education, allows students to receive cross-border education without going abroad through online educational interactions. Additionally, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates the development of virtual mobility, and the challenges of virtual mobility come into the front, which leads to concerns about its sustainability in the post-pandemic era. This study aims to analyse the state and trends of virtual mobility research through a bibliometric analysis of the existing literature. A bibliometric study of 540 virtual mobility-related publications from the Scopus database, spanning from 1998 to July 2024, has been conducted. Performance analysis is utilised to examine the annual publication distribution, the main contributors (authors, journals, articles, affiliations and countries), and the top author keywords in virtual mobility research. Science mapping is adopted to reveal the social network and intellectual structure followed by themetic evoluation of keywords within virtual mobility research domain. The results indicate that the publication trend can be identified in three waves, with a sharp increase in the latest period. The dominant research hotspot is international students’ online education caused by COVID-19; and collaborative online international learning (COIL), student engagement, e-learning, and programme for international student assessment (PISA) are the four research areas with potential for further research.