Special Needs in Music Education from an Inclusive Perspective: A Bibliometric Review

Inclusive education strives to provide equal educational opportunities for all individuals. Special music education also aims to meet all students’ diverse needs. However, there are few studies using bibliometric to analyze inclusive music with special needs. The purpose of this study is to use Vosviewer and CiteSpace software to analyze the research on inclusive special music education from 2013 to 2022. Using the PRISMA protocol, the researchers extracted bibliometric data from Scopus database to analyze the development and research trends of inclusive special music education from various perspectives, including countries, universities, authors, journals, years, and publishers. This study found that the overall number of papers published in 696 studies that met the inclusion criteria showed an increasing trend year by year. The United States became the country with the largest number of publications (n=157). The keyword "child" emphasizes the current research hotspots in this field. Inclusive is an important research perspective of current special music education, and the integration of inclusive special music education with music therapy, psychology and other research fields is also the research trend in this field. The researchers discussed the research background of inclusive special music education, evaluated the research status, and provided theoretical inspiration for future research in this field.