Mapping five decades of life skills education research in compulsory schooling: A dual-database bibliometric and science mapping analysis (1977–2026)

Life skills education has been promoted in school systems for five decades, yet its research literature has rarely been mapped with compulsory schooling as a defining condition. At primary level the agenda is carried largely by an integrated course taught by the generalist primary school teacher, a course known in the English-language literature as Life Studies, which makes the state of this literature a question for primary teacher education as well as for policy. This bibliometric study examines the conceptual structure, intellectual foundations, and geographical development of school-based life skills education, with particular attention to primary schooling and teacher education. Records from Web of Science and Scopus were merged, deduplicated, and screened using explicit eligibility criteria. Keyword co-occurrence and cited-reference analyses were conducted using normalised terminology, community detection, and sensitivity testing. Out-of-school sport literature was analysed separately to examine its intellectual connections with school-based research. The literature has expanded considerably over the past decade, revealing five thematic groupings and two keyword pairs. Major themes include adolescent wellbeing and social and emotional learning, prevention and substance use, sport-based positive youth development, psychosocial competencies, and secondary education. Primary schooling and teachers appear mainly within prevention-oriented research rather than curriculum-focused scholarship. Over time, research emphasis has shifted from substance-use and infection prevention towards wellbeing and social and emotional learning. Although sport-based research forms a distinct literature, sport psychology remains influential in the school-based field. Sensitivity analyses indicate that thematic structures vary across analytical parameters and corpus definitions, warranting cautious interpretation. The findings suggest that life skills education represents a policy-driven label spanning multiple research traditions rather than a consolidated field. A shared operational definition linked explicitly to social and emotional learning is needed to strengthen conceptual coherence and future research.