Critical thinking, creative thinking, systems thinking and many more: A comparative bibliometric analysis of prevalence and distribution

• Critical thinking is the most prevalent way of thinking in research documents. • Design thinking and computational thinking have recently risen to prominence. • Creative thinking and critical thinking are often referred to together. • Systems thinking is well-distributed across academic disciplines. • Critical, systems and design thinking dominate research related to the SDGs To compare discourses related to different ways of thinking, a bibliometric analysis was performed on the Dimensions database of research documents. Terms related to 78 ways of thinking were ranked according to the number of documents containing them over the last five years (2020 to 2024). Twenty ways of thinking were subjected to further analyses, examining (i) those that are most prevalent (with the top five being critical thinking, design thinking, creative thinking, systems thinking then computational thinking); (ii) the different suffixes appended to each term (with critical thinking mostly referred to as a skill, systems thinking mostly referred to as an approach and design thinking almost equally referred to as a method, approach and process); (iii) the proportion of documents focusing on each of them, rather than simply referring to them (with computational thinking having the highest such proportion); (iv) their rise to prevalence since 1975 (with critical thinking and systems thinking slowly gaining prevalence compared to the more recent rise of design thinking and computational thinking); (v) the frequency with which they are referred to together (with critical thinking and creative thinking co-occurring most often); (vi) their distribution across various academic disciplines (with futures thinking being quite evenly distributed, but computational thinking being highly concentrated); (vii) their distribution across the Sustainable Development Goals (with critical thinking, systems thinking and design thinking being most prevalent in this respect). The findings and visualisations provide a useful basis for identifying, comparing, selecting and combining different ways of thinking.