Date

5-20-2026

Department

School of Behavioral Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Counselor Education and Supervision (PhD)

Chair

Frederic Volk

Keywords

bibliometrics, Bradford’s Law, CACREP, counselor education, faculty scholarship, publication trends, scholarly productivity

Disciplines

Counseling

Abstract

Scholarly publication is a cornerstone of faculty evaluation, professional identity, and knowledge development in counselor education. Despite calls for empirical investigation into publication trends, limited research has examined the scope, distribution, and impact of counselor educator scholarship across Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP). This quantitative, cross-sectional bibliometric study examined publication trends, thematic alignment, and citation patterns among 222 counselor educators across 25 CACREP-accredited doctoral programs from 2000 to 2026. Using GS profiles as the primary data source, bibliographic records from 4,876 peer-reviewed publications across 2,132 journals were extracted and analyzed using the Bibliometrix package, igraph, and the tidyverse suite of R packages. Findings revealed that the top 10% of authors responsible for nearly half of all publications and three institutions accounting for nearly one-third of total output. Distribution of articles across journals followed Bradford’s Law of Scattering. Qualitative methods were the most prevalent research approach, and citation patterns were heavily right-skewed. Content analysis revealed that, while 93.5% of publications aligned with at least one CACREP core curriculum area, group counseling and group work were significantly underrepresented relative to accreditation expectations. Findings are discussed in relation to Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice, with implications for doctoral training, faculty mentorship, tenure and promotion policy, and future directions in counselor education scholarship.

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