Where is the andragogy, geragogy, and heutagogy literature headed? a multidimensional text-mining analysis of adult and older adult education research

As societies age, adult education becomes increasingly important for preparing individuals for the future. This study aims to highlight the current gaps and future trends in adult and older adult education (AOAE) by text-mining the scholarship that explicitly invokes its named learning paradigms. A computational text mining with qualitative interpretive validation was used in this study. We analyzed 1321 eligible articles indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases between 1981 and 2025, retrieved through the vocabulary of the named adult-learning paradigms (andragogy, geragogy, heutagogy, and adult pedagogy), using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm on their titles, abstracts, and keywords. The study revealed nine main topics: Different Aspects and Approaches of Andragogy within Various Professions; Research and Developments on Adults and Older Adults Professional Learning Practices in Education and Health Settings; Learning, Training and Development Programs towards AOAE; Self-learning Perspectives for Adults and Older Adults; Development Strategies and Learning Opportunities around Andragogy; Teachers and Instructors in Adult Education and Learning Needs of Adults in Various Fields; Adult Learning through the development of Andragogical Perspectives; Using Online Technology for Education and Training of Adult Learners through Andragogical Principles; Adult Education in Medical Studies, Methods Enhancing Teaching and Learning. The most published topics were Development Strategies and Learning Opportunities around Andragogy, Self-learning Perspectives for Adults and Older Adults, and the Use of Online Technology for the Education and Training of Adult Learners Through Andragogy. However, the topic with the strongest upward publication trend was Self-learning Perspectives for Adults and Older Adults, while Development Strategies and Learning Opportunities around Andragogy declined despite having the highest number of publications. The findings reveal that if current trends continue, self-learning perspectives are expected to dominate AOAE research, while development strategies and learning opportunities, which are the most popular topics, are consistent with possible thematic saturation. Furthermore, two areas vital to the aging population show low visibility in the corpus. The first is the imperative to focus on digital adaptation and inequalities, whose negative point estimate is uncertain and whose confidence interval includes zero. The second is strengthening conceptual consistency. However, both findings highlight a targeted investigation rather than being read as established declines. Future research should focus on digital competencies and online learning of older adults, the conceptual background of andragogy, and multidisciplinary studies through heutagogy, gerontology, and geragogy perspectives to support healthy aging. The proliferation of overlapping terms in AOAE research (andragogy, geragogy, heutagogy, peeragogy, and cybergogy, etc.) is consistent with a pre-paradigmatic reading, pointing to the need for conceptual consolidation. Within this corpus, the agenda is predominantly instrumental in orientation, whereas emancipatory and civic concerns did not emerge as a distinct lexical topic. Since non-detection in an unsupervised lexical model is not the same as absence, we treat this as a boundary of what the corpus and method reveal rather than as evidence that such concerns are missing from the field.