International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring: A Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis 2013–2022

Since 2003, the IJEBCM has bridged scholarly inquiry and professional practice in coaching and mentoring. While Hodge documented the journal's first decade, its second decade remained unexamined. This study addresses the gap by integrating a systematic literature review (SLR) with three bibliometric techniques (citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, co-word analysis) applied to 274 articles published between 2013 and 2022. The findings reveal intellectual maturation: publication output stabilised while citation influence accelerated after the journal's inclusion in Scopus and Web of Science. Intellectual influence was distributed across conceptual, methodological, and practice-oriented contributions drawing on interdisciplinary foundations. The corpus resolved into five interconnected thematic clusters, and conceptual analysis confirmed that coaching and mentoring function as distinct yet integrated scholarly communities. The study terms this relationship differentiated integration, where each practice retains a scholarly identity while drawing on, and contributing to, a common evidence base. The study concludes by mapping emerging and neglected research frontiers.