A visualization analysis of career guidance in higher education: using Citespace

Abstract Career guidance is a process that helps people discover and develop their interests, values, abilities and goals, and assists them in making decisions about their future studies, employment and other pursuits. Higher education aims to cultivate talent for society and furnish a strong workforce to facilitate societal advancement. The research on the application of career guidance in higher education is becoming more and more extensive and in-depth. The method of this study is bibliometric review by searching for the keywords “TS = career guidance AND (TS = higher education OR TS = education OR TS = curriculum)” in the SSCI database of the Web of Science and following the guideline of PRISMA to select the published articles ( N = 233) during the period 1970–2024 to visualize and analyze using the Citespace (version 6.4.R1) to perform the results. The visualization analysis of this study is through keyword co-occurrence analysis, keyword timeline clustering analysis and burst detection analysis to identify the research hotspots and trends of career guidance in higher education, and to predict the possible future research directions.