Research on the State of Virtual Reality in Higher Education: a Bibliometric Visual Analysis Based on CiteSpace

This paper aims to conduct bibliometric and visual analysis using CiteSpace to systematically sort out the research state, hot topics and development trends of virtual reality in the field of higher education from January 2005 to June 2025. Taking the Web of Science Core Collection database as the data source, the literature related to virtual reality and higher education was retrieved. The CiteSpace 6.4.R1 software was used to conduct cooperative analysis, co-occurrence analysis and co-citation analysis on 1,100 highly cited English articles. Construct the graphs of publishing trends, national cooperation, institutional cooperation, author cooperation, co-citation by authors, co-occurrence of keywords, keyword clustering, keyword time and keyword emergence. The results show that this field has gone through three stages: nascent exploration, rapid development and deepening integration. The United States, China, Spain and the United Kingdom are leading countries, with institutions such as the Florida State University system and the University of Hong Kong playing a core role. The research hotspots have gradually shifted from the application of VR in higher education to key areas such as learning outcome evaluation, technology acceptance, learning motivation, learning effectiveness, user experience and educational equity. The research results confirm that virtual reality has become an important driving force for the digital transformation of higher education. In the future, multi-disciplinary integration, international collaboration and empirical research on educational psychological effects should be strengthened to promote the deep integration of virtual reality educational applications and the improvement of teaching effectiveness.