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Abstract

This study employed bibliometric analysis to analyze the research on critical race theory (CRT) in education. We employed four approaches: citation analysis, document co-citation analysis, social network analysis, and keyword co-occurrence to examine the scientific structure of CRT research in education based on 1,464 documents and 55,493 cited references. Using VOSviewer, we identified four distinct clusters of CRT research that characterize the intellectual structure of CRT research in education. We examined how specific works influence the field using social network analysis (SNA). The SNA revealed various amounts of overall centrality (i.e., 15.42% degree centrality, 25.24% closeness centrality, and approximately 0% betweenness centrality). These results indicate that the documents’ direct influence on the co-citation network is stronger than the indirect and informal influence. Finally, the keyword co-occurrence analysis results indicate four distinct clusters of CRT research foci. The results provide important considerations for future research while refuting claims that CRT is a tool for indoctrinating America’s youth.

Keywords

critical race theory bibliometric analysis citation analysis co-citation analysis keyword co-occurrence analysis

In the wake of the 2020 presidential election and the subsequent incident at the U.S. Capitol building, a tide of critique has risen aimed at critical race theory (CRT) in education. In September 2020, former President Trump described CRT as “being forced into our children’s schools,”“a Marxist doctrine,” inundating our universities, and “being deployed to rip apart friends, neighborhoods, and families.” President Trump further stated, “teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.” Near the end of the speech, he stated, “critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, an ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country” (Lang, 2020). Arguably, President Trump commissioned the 1776 Report to “promote patriotic education” and “restore” American history and social studies with an “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling” accounting of national history (Arne et al., 2021, p. 1). The report frames CRT as the intellectual origin of identity politics that “…divide Americans by placing them perpetually in conflict with each other. This extreme ideology assaults and undermines the American principle of equality in several key ways” (Arne et al., 2021, p. 31). However, it is important to note that the report failed to cite specific evidence to support its claims concerning CRT. Thus, this inquiry will provide the proper intellectual context within which the contributions and uses of CRT should be understood. Such an effort is needed to deter current legislative efforts to marginalize equity education in P–12 schools and higher education by using CRT as their central justification.

It is critical to note that CRT is primarily a research framework designed to eliminate racism and its harmful impacts on education and U.S. society. This research approach is not used in any measurable way in P–12 curriculum development, teacher preparation, or classroom teaching. Conversely, researchers and teacher educators have developed many pedagogies effective for educating children of color, immigrants, multilingual, and economically marginalized learners. These approaches include culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1994, 2009), multicultural education (Banks & Banks, 1995), culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2018 ), culturally sustaining/affirming/revitalizing pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017), and hip-hop pedagogy (Hill, 2009), among others. Additionally, CRT should not be confused with ethnic studies—distant fields predating CRT by more than a century. The present inquiry seeks to distinguish the reality of CRT from political rhetoric by examining the reach and scope of research employing CRT and critical race methodologies through bibliometric analysis.

Such work is critically warranted because CRT has been thrust into the public’s eye and mischaracterized as a vehicle for oppression, indoctrination, and anti-democratic teaching. Numerous organizations and politicians have used this justification to introduce legislation attacking or restricting progressive curricula, civics education, ethnic studies courses, and CRT in higher education. Supportively, the UCLA Law School’s (Crtforward.law.ucla.edu., n.d.) CRT Forward Tracking Project estimates that since January 2021, approximately 508 local, state, and federal efforts have been introduced against CRT nationally. In reality, CRT is a legal and educational research theory almost exclusively taught at the graduate level in colleges and universities. To “talk back” against the illogical and illegitimate misuse of CRT, the present research seeks to characterize the nature and use of CRT in education by positioning the theory within its most appropriate context—higher education research. We examine how researchers have used CRT to inform research since its application to education in 1995, with the publication of Ladson-Billings and Tate’s article entitled “Toward a Critical Race Theory in Education.” This rigorous bibliometric approach will provide empirical evidence to critically evaluate how researchers have employed CRT over the past 27 years. This record will also provide the research community with clarity on past trends and matters that remain underexplored by critical race theorists.

Given the surge of disinformation and misuse of CRT, this research first contextualizes its history and tenets, then presents the results from a bibliometric network analysis of 1,464 documents and 55,493 citations from CRT scholarship published since 1995. The researchers employed citation analysis, document co-citation analysis, social network analysis, and keyword co-occurrence to examine the reach and scope of this evolving and relevant research framework. However, critical race research, by its very nature, is action-orientated (Parker & Stovall, 2004); thus, this work is a way of “talking back” to those who wish to misappropriate the spirit of CRT for anti-democratic aims. The forthcoming section will detail a brief history of CRT, its tenets, and a synthesis of salient seminal works in this line of inquiry.

Literature Review: Critical Race Theory and Education

Educational scholars employ CRT to explore the wide-reaching impacts of race and racism on U.S. educational policy and practices, including curriculum development, instruction, administrative processes, and student learning and development. CRT originated from critical legal studies and has been used in education to call out the racial oppression of people of color and students from historically marginalized communities (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2004; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2016). CRT’s tenets include: (a) an unequivocal claim that race and racism are central, endemic, permanent, and fundamental in defining and explaining how the U.S. society functions; (b) a challenge to dominant ideologies and claims of race neutrality, objectivity, meritocracy, colorblindness, and equal opportunity; (c) principles that are activist in nature and honor a commitment to social justice; (d) centering the experiences and voices of the marginalized and oppressed; and (e) being necessarily interdisciplinary in scope and function (Bernal, 2002; D. Solorzano & Yosso, 2000). Together these tenets help educational researchers develop and interpret research phenomena that are observed through empirical investigations in classrooms and other educational settings.

CRT as a framework was initially tethered conceptually to K–12 education in the mid-1990s (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). However, the initial writings that served to form CRT’s foundations in the field of education originate from a plethora of scholars in different social and political fields (D. Bell, 2008; Delgado, 1989; Delgado & Stefancic, 1993). Using CRT within the K–12 educational landscape to address critical problems facing historically marginalized groups has grown considerably in the last quarter century. Numerous researchers utilized this framework to explicate the shortcomings of an educational system because of the endemic effect of race and racism on learning environments (Gillborn, 2013; Taylor et al., 2009). The critique of education and the systems that operate under the education umbrella are situated within two distinct yet connected domains. Drawing from legal scholarship, CRT examines inequities based on the restrictive role of education and the expansive promise that education potentially holds for students (Capper, 2015). Whereas the expansive capabilities of education can, through institutional power, redress inequities and construct future processes and outcomes that promote equity. Unfortunately, the restrictive aspects of education are not concerned with the past and continual transgressions as the result of race and racism. Such contention between both sides is noticeable in education when counternarratives or counter-stories are presented.

In education, the constant dominant narrative is rife with deficit language against all historically minoritized groups that do not resemble the idea property state of Whiteness (DeCuir & Dixson, 2004). Thus, problematic outcomes and the processes that create these outcomes are ignored if they do not jeopardize the growth and maturation of educational attainment for White citizens. The counternarrative as a tenet reveals that those who racism in education affects have a voice that is on par with the dominant hegemonic discourse (Dixson & Anderson, 2016). In fact, CRT in education positions dominant and race-neutral discourse as ever-present and evolving barriers. Barriers that, when poorly addressed or not addressed at all, can reshape and reform to present new challenges and inequitable outcomes for students of color. For example, scholars harken to the importance of the Brown versus Board of Education decision as an alteration to the educational landscape. Although it eliminated the policy portion of “separate but equal,” it did not address the institutional parameters that created and sustained the separate but equal mantra through education and society. According to CRT scholars, the mechanisms that formulated the foundation of separate but equal education formed new measures to promote racism and, thus, inequality (D. A. Bell, 1980). The rise of separatist schools, busing, redistricting, dismantling of predominantly Black schools, and the predominately White school’s outright resistance to integration were some of the first newly formed processes and outcomes to restrict equality. CRT’s importance within the field of education is that, as a framework, scholars are able to promote the expansive view of equity in education by investigating the aforementioned events while simultaneously critiquing what can be considered the neo-separate but equal occurrences throughout education.

Essentially, without the existence of CRT as a framework for understanding the particulars of racism throughout education, the field, current and future scholars, practitioners, and the various communities that the system of education is supposed to elevate to produce citizens, would be unaware of the prevalence of the systematic oppressing processes and outcomes. CRT challenges the notion that Black boys and girls are supposed to have higher rates of school discipline outcomes by critiquing the purported approaches and policies, such as the Guns Free Act of 1994 or the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, that attempt to disenfranchise students. Through a CRT lens, teacher attrition and shortages are not solely due to inadequate pay and “unsavory” working conditions, but rather the teacher workforce condition is a result of past and continual racialized practices in hiring and training that protect and affirm a homogenous, culturally monolithic White teaching workforce. Furthermore, a CRT perspective in education recognizes how racism amplifies inequalities across social constructs (i.e., ability, language, nationality, social class, etc.) individually and collectively. Due to such a perspective, scholars and advocates employing CRT in education have leaned heavily on prescribing solutions that do not sacrifice liberating one group for the oppression of another through the transmutation of racism. Given the vast and numerous applications of CRT to examine educational phenomena, several previous systematic reviews of CRT in education exist and warrant our consideration in relation to the present study’s goals.

Prior Synthesis of Critical Race Theory in Education

The previous syntheses of CRT within educational scholarship provide a strong foundation for understanding the application of CRT to address broad as well as specific educational challenges. In this section, we review prior syntheses in chronological order to explicate CRT’s evolution as a theoretical framework in education. In one of the earliest works, Tate (1997) provided a foundation for implementing CRT in educational research by reviewing the broader literature on CRT and contextualizing the results for the field of education. In 2005, Dixson and Rousseau examined articles that used CRT in education from 1995 to 2003. They sought to understand how the tenets of CRT based on legal literature were used in education. Dixson and Rousseau (2005) concluded that voice, restrictive versus expansive views of equality, and the problem with colorblindness could be traced back to the origins of CRT in law.

Lynn and Parker (2006) advanced the discussion of CRT in education by examining studies that used CRT as a theoretical or methodological framework to expose the effects of racism in the K–12 educational environment. The studies discussed used CRT to examine persistent racial inequities in education, qualitative research methods, pedagogy, practice, the schooling experiences of marginalized students of color, and the efficacy of race-conscious education policy (Lynn & Parker, 2006). Lynn and Parker believed that how CRT was used in sociology would shape how CRT influenced the ways in which educational researchers would use CRT in the future. Moreover, Hartlep (2009) echoed this call in his review of CRT by providing suggestions for future research considerations in education.

Hartlep (2009) addressed critics who claimed that CRT was “overly subjective,” which is important because, as Ladson-Billings (2006) asserted, CRT is not rooted in “objectivity” or “rationality.” Harlep (2009) further described the expansion of CRT, which now includes critical race feminism (CRF), Latino critical race studies (LatCrit), Asian American critical race studies (AsianCrit), American Indian critical race studies (TribalCrit), and queer-crit. Hartlep’s (2009) review provided educational scholars with a more expansive and inclusive lens through which to apply CRT to guide and interpret their scholarly endeavors. Crenshaw (2011) reviewed decades of CRT literature to inform future research and practice to combat the effects of a “post-racial” turn in American society.

The post-racial movement in American society is in direct conflict with CRT’s tenets. A post-racial lens is characterized by an absence of racism, discrimination, or prejudice. However, an important tenet of CRT is the permanence of racism. Hence, Crenshaw (2011) advocated for CRT scholars to mount a transdisciplinary critique of post-racial ideologies. This transdisciplinary movement is arguably most notable in the recent rise of QuantCrit (referred to as explained in the theoretical framework) amongst critical scholars. Finally, Ledesma and Calderon (2015) built upon the foundation earlier scholars provided to examine CRT in K–12 and higher education (Dixson & Rousseau, 2005; Lynn & Parker, 2006). They found that CRT could be divided into two subgenres in the education literature: K–12 education concerns and higher education concerns. They also divided the emergent themes of CRT identified in their review of K–12 and higher education. In K–12, articles focused on (a) curriculum and pedagogy, (b) teaching and learning, (c) schooling, and (d) policy/finance and community engagement. While in higher education, the authors noted that studies focused on (a) color blindness, (b) selective admissions policies, and (c) campus racial climate. Ledesma and Calderon (2015) believed CRT in K–12 and higher education had grown since the previous syntheses, but would continue to be challenged in “post-racial” society. The previous syntheses provide exceptional documentation of the thematic implementation of CRT across the educational literature. However, prior syntheses underexamined the impact and intellectual connectedness present within CRT research in education. The present study sought to fill this void by applying bibliometrics (i.e., a statistical analysis of books, articles, or other publications used to track author output and impact), which to our knowledge, has yet to be applied to the CRT literature in education. Moreover, to maintain the integrity of CRT, we applied bibliometric methods through the lens of QuantCrit to remain true to the essence of the framework within the quantitative space.

Theoretical Framework

More recently, scholars have theorized an extension of CRT’s tenets to the quantitative research paradigm, which we refer to here as QuantCrit (Young & Cunningham, 2021). QuantCrit places an acute focus on the centrality of race and racism in the United States. In a special issue of Race, Ethnicity, and Education, titled “QuantCrit: Rectifying Quantitative Methods Through Critical Race Theory,” the authors explore the utility of quantitative analysis as a methodological tool for examining educational phenomena through the CRT lens. López et al. (2018) asserted that using QuantCrit in educational research allows researchers to ask: “Data for whom and what?” as a starting point for deracializing data and statistical analysis. The authors in the special issue argued that quantitative data could not be fully understood when race and other identity markers that materially affected the lived experiences of people of color were removed from the equation.

Gillborn et al. (2018) suggested that numbers and data are not blind, but can be used to inform policy changes and outcomes, hence QuantCrit’s utility. The tenets of QuantCrit include: (a) the centrality of racism, (b) numbers are not neutral, (c) categories are neither “natural” nor given—for “race” read “racism,” (d) voice and insight in which data cannot “speak for itself,” and (e) using numbers for social justice (p. 169). In the present study, we are among the first to apply a QuantCrit framing to analyze and interpret bibliometric data. This is unique because bibliometric data are often used to discredit or marginalize the scholarship of people of color as many scholars often look to h-indices and citation rates as indicators of scholarly impact, and these scholars then use these measures to critique the work of scholars of color. Given that scholars of color typically study issues related to people of color and that scholars of color remain underrepresented in the academy, it stands to reason that citation trends of topics such as CRT may pale in comparison to more mainstream lines of inquiry. However, we posit that this is not the case; rather, CRT in education is thriving, thus the political and societal urge to halt the scholarly progress of CRT and the utilization of CRT to inform research and practice within education.

We place special attention on the centrality of racism, voice, and insight, as well as using numbers for social justice. Here we posit that the utility of CRT has come under undue scrutiny as it has emerged and evolved into a mainstream theoretical framework within numerous disciplines, from education to the medical sciences (Bridges et al., 2017). CRT’s growing acceptance is most evident in the bibliometric indices used to rate the quality and impact of scholarship (see Vinkler, 2010). Due to the centrality of racism, the systems and mechanisms used to measure scholarly impact are inherently biased and have impeded the production of CRT scholarship. Yet, we claim that CRT has thrived despite opposition. To substantiate this claim, we conduct multiple bibliometric analyses to measure the scope and impact of CRT within educational research scholarship. We attempt to achieve the following four objectives in the present study:

Identify key documents that significantly contribute to the use of CRT in the field of education.

To document CRT’s bibliometric and thematic evolution in education by identifying the connections between key documents.

To capture the level of centralization present in the scholarship utilizing CRT within educational contexts.

To examine the representative lines of inquiry surrounding CRT scholarship in education.

Methods

The present study was conducted in five steps, outlined in Figure 1. First, our data were retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) core collection. The WoS core collection is considered the premier resource on the WoS and the world’s most trusted citation index for scientific and scholarly research (Clarivate, 2021). We chose the WoS over other bibliometric resources (e.g., Google Scholar, Scopus) because a secondary goal of this study was to further explicate the empirical rigor and scientific authenticity of CRT as a means to combat mounting fallacies concerning the theory’s scientific legitimacy. The WoS is arguably the most notable and comprehensive citation index for high-quality scholarship, as evidenced by a curated collection of over 21,000 peer-reviewed journals published globally and in over 250 disciplines, including science, social science, and humanities.

Figure 1.

Five stage study design of components.

Document Retrieval

A WoS keyword search (Critical Race theory AND education) yielded an initial pool of 1,782 records. Figure 2 presents a tree map of the WoS keyword search results. Because of our acute focus on scholarship that was highly centered within an educational context, the records’ abstracts not identified in the “Education Educational Research” section of the tree map were further examined for inclusion during the initial screening. These records represented the following disciplines, in order of representation: ethnic studies, urban studies, sociology, social sciences interdisciplinary, social work, psychology education, education scientific disciplines, social issues, and psychology applied. After reviewing all the titles and abstracts of the 436 records not included initially, an additional 118 records were retained, yielding a citation analysis pool of 1,464 documents.

Figure 2.

Tree map of critical race theory and education keyword search results.

Citation Analysis Procedure

All of the documents’ full records in our final pool were downloaded from the WoS as a Microsoft Excel file. The data were then cleaned and screened to identify inconsistencies and irregularities that can occur when the data are exported from WoS. Our final pool of documents contained 96,714 cited references, with a mean of 66.06 references per document. These data were uploaded into Stata version 16.0 for citation analysis. To identify the most influential CRT scholarship within the field of education, we first calculated citation frequencies for each of the documents and then normalized the citation frequency data by dividing each document’s number of citations by the group mean number of citations. This normalized citation index provides each document’s measure of impact in relation to the mean. Thus, a document with a normalized citation index of 2 was cited twice as many times as the group mean. Then, we sorted the data by citation frequency and identified all documents with a minimum of 50 citations to identify the most influential documents within the CRT educational literature.

Cocitation Analysis Procedure

By definition, documents are considered co-cited when they appear together in the reference lists of other documents. For instance, if document X contains a reference to both document Y and document Z, then Y and Z are co-cited by document X. Co-citation is important to the present study because it can be used to examine the intellectual knowledge organization of CRT research. According to Small (1973), co-citation reflects five different kinds of relations. However, three co-citation relations are of particular interest to the present study: (1) co-citations can reveal relationships or connections that members of the CRT scholarly community strongly recognize, (2) co-citations may represent “semantic” relationships between co-cited documents, and (3) co-citations can identify core/seminal works in CRT. The co-citation analysis was limited to documents with a minimum of 50 citations as a mechanism to increase the likelihood of the co-citation analysis producing results that represented the most enduring and important relations within the CRT scholarship.

We produced a bibliometric map of document co-citation patterns using VOSviewer. We used the visualization of similarities or the VOS mapping technique (Van Eck & Waltman, 2007) to construct our co-citation bibliometric map. The VOS mapping technique is based on the similarity matrix (Van Eck & Waltman, 2009). The similarity matrix is created by adjusting the co-occurrence matrix for differences in the total number of occurrences or co-occurrences of items. This process is referred to as normalizing the similarity data. The Jaccard index, also known as the Jaccard similarity coefficient, is the most popular index used to normalize the similarity data. The Jaccard Index is used to determine the degree of similarity between two samples and the level of diversity between them. H owever, VOSviewer uses association strength or proximity index, which according to Van Eck and Waltman (2007), has some advantages over the Jaccard index. For example, the association strength between two items i and j can be defined as $A S_{ij} = \frac{c_{ij}}{c_{i} c_{j}}$ , where c_ij represents the number of co-occurrences (i.e., co-citations) of documents i and j while c_i and c_j represent the total number of occurrences of the i and j or the total number of co-occurrences of these items. The co-citation map generated by VOSviewer is then based on the similarity matrix.

Social Network Analysis

We then conducted an SNA based on the bibliometric co-citation map that VOSviewer generated. In the present study, we used SNA to examine the structure, relationships, and impacts of co-cited documents using three measures of centrality or influence. These three measures (degree centrality, betweenness centrality, and closeness centrality) are often characterized as analogs to the three traditional measures of central tendency (i.e., mode, median, and mean). Appropriately, these measures represent measures of “center” within the SNA context. The first measure of degree centrality represents the number of direct connections between actors (i.e., documents). A vertex’s degree centrality is the sum of all its connections. As a crude popularity measure, it does not distinguish quantity from quality. This measure of direct influences ranges from 0 to n−1, where n represents the total number of actors or, in our case, documents. For instance, if there are 10 documents in SNA, the maximum value for degree centrality would be 9; intuitively, this makes sense, given that a document could not be connected to itself within the network. Thus, degree centrality is often considered analogous to the mode.

The second measure examined was betweenness centrality, the number of times an actor, in our case, a co-cited work, occurs on the shortest path length between two other actors in the network. In a network, betweenness centrality measures how much a vertex bridges gaps. Betweenness centrality measures how closely the user falls to the shortest path between other pairs of users. A node’s betweenness centrality increases as more other nodes rely on it to bridge connections. Hence, betweenness centrality is compared to the median measure of central tendency.

Finally, we examined the closeness centrality or the normalized mean path length from an actor to all other actors in the network. In a network, closeness centrality indicates an element’s proximity to its neighbors. It captures each vertex’s average distance from every other vertex in the network, a different perspective from those used in other network metrics. Therefore, the closeness centrality can be considered analogous to the mean of a traditional data set.

Keyword Co-Occurrence

The final analysis is a keyword co-occurrence analysis. Co-occurrence happens when two words appear in the same document or document field. Hence, keyword co-occurrence is when two words appear together within a document’s keyword field. The number of times keywords appear together in a database indicates co-occurrence. The co-occurrence of keywords within the CRT scholarship reflects unique relations in the literature that represent the primary lines of inquiry or thematic foci of CRT within the field of education. The full records for the 1,464 records retrieved from WoS were uploaded to VOSviewer, and a bibliometric map based on keyword co-occurrence was created for words that co-occurred a minimum of 50 times. Thematic relationships were examined within the clusters generated.

Results

The research process for the present study was completed in five steps and provides a mapping of the scope, impact, and scholarly focus of CRT within educational research. This section organizes the results by the analysis performed, progressing from citation analysis to keyword co-citation analysis.

Citation Analysis Results

A total of 1,464 documents in the WoS were identified as applications of CRT in education research. There were 21,199 citations in total across the included documents. Citation counts ranged from 0 to 1,487, with an average citation frequency of M = 14.49 (SD = 55.93). The relatively large standard deviation indicates the large spread of citation counts across the dataset and the negative skew of the data, possibly due to the “vintage effect” or the natural increase of citation counts as a document gets older. It is also important to note that 385 (26.30%) documents had a citation count of zero. This is 23.70% less than the national average of about 50% of documents going uncited (Williams, 2014). The five most cited articles were published before 2010. The top five most cited documents in order of citation count were Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995), D. Solorzano et al. (2000), D. G. Solorzano and Bernal (2001), Gillborn (2005), and T. Yosso et al. (2009). These five documents account for approximately 17% of the CRT citations observed in the education research retrieved from WoS. Moreover, the Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) article was cited 102 times more than the average number of citations. Table 1 presents the full list of 144 documents with at least 50 citations. Documents with a minimum of 50 citations represent the most influential documents within the CRT educational literature based on the number of citations.

Table 1.

Citation Frequency and Normalized Citations Rates for the Top 100 Cited Articles.

Author(s)	Citation frequency	Normalized citations
Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995)	1,487	102.62
Solorzano et al. (2000)	918	63.35
Solorzano and Bernal (2001)	502	34.64
Gillborn (2005)	446	30.78
Yosso et al. (2009)	372	25.67
Tate (1997)	365	25.19
Ladson-Billings (1999)	285	19.67
Castagno and Brayboy (2008)	265	18.29
Picower (2009)	256	17.67
Lopez (2003)	201	13.87
Moje (2007)	199	13.73
Abrams and Moio (2009)	191	13.18
Annamma et al. (2013)	177	12.22
Gutierrez (2013)	161	11.11
Leonardo and Porter (2010)	158	10.90
Harper (2012)	157	10.83
Howard (2008)	148	10.21
McGee and Martin (2011)	140	9.66
Huber and Solorzano (2015)	131	9.04
Harper (2009)	124	8.56
Villenas and Deyhle (1999)	117	8.07
Milner (2008)	116	8.01
Harper et al. (2009)	114	7.87
Vaught and Castagno (2008)	111	7.66
Rolon-Dow (2005)	110	7.59
Milner (2013)	107	7.38
Kohli and Solorzano (2012)	107	7.38
Ortiz and Jani (2010)	107	7.38
Gildersleeve et al. (2011)	103	7.11
Kubota and Lin (2006)	103	7.11
Jayakumar et al. (2009)	102	7.04
Lynn (1999)	95	6.56
Dumas and Ross (2016)	92	6.35
Rogers and Mosley (2006)	92	6.35
Annamma et al. (2017)	91	6.28
Iverson (2007)	91	6.28
Evans (2007)	91	6.28
Sleeter (2017)	90	6.21
Schutz (2006)	90	6.21
Nadal et al. (2014)	87	6.00
Harwood et al. (2012)	87	6.00
Patton (2016)	85	5.87
Watts and Erevelles (2004)	84	5.80
Cooper (2009)	83	5.73
Brown and Brown (2010)	82	5.66
Kohli (2009)	82	5.66
Turner et al. (2011)	78	5.38
Gillborn (2010)	78	5.38
Rorrer et al. (2008)	78	5.38
Berry (2008)	77	5.31
Diem et al. (2014)	75	5.18
Howard (2013)	75	5.18
Castagno (2008)	73	5.04
Smith et al. (2007)	72	4.97
Ong et al. (2018)	71	4.90
Milner (2008)	69	4.76
Brown (2014)	68	4.69
Jani et al. (2011)	67	4.62
James (2012)	65	4.49
Santamaria (2014)	64	4.42
Gillborn (2010)	60	4.14
Ladson-Billings and Tate (2017)	59	4.07
Palmer (2010)	59	4.07
Hylton (2012)	57	3.93
Ladson-Billings (2009)	57	3.93
Minikel-Lacocque (2013)	55	3.80
Yoon (2012)	55	3.80
Parker and Villalpando (2007)	55	3.80
McGee and Stovall (2015)	54	3.73
Taylor (1998)	54	3.73
Gooden and Dantley (2012)	53	3.66
Stinson (2008)	53	3.66
Matias and Zembylas (2014)	52	3.59
Andreotti (2011)	51	3.52
Aleman (2007)	51	3.52
Chubbuck (2004)	51	3.52
Henry et al. (2017)	50	3.45
Matias et al. (2014)	50	3.45
Heilig et al. (2012)	50	3.45
Grant and Simmons (2008)	50	3.45

The production of CRT research in education has been relatively consistent with slight fluctuations in citation and publication rates; overall, the data reflect a positive trend. The publication and citation trends are presented in Figure 3. Substantial drops in publication frequencies are noticeable in 2010, 2018, and 2020. However, the citation trends seem to increase exponentially, likely due to the vintage effect.

Figure 3.

Longitudinal citation and publication trends for CRT research in education.

Co-Citation Analysis

The bibliographic map of the co-citation patterns revealed four distinct clusters/classifications of studies that tend to guide educational research utilizing CRT. Figure 4 presents the VOSviewer co-citation bibliometric map. The map is composed of nodes representing the documents as weighted by the citation counts, which are denoted by the circles’ relative size. Four unique clusters of studies represent four distinct inquiry structures for CRT within education. Cluster 1 (n = 44) represented 30.6% of the documents in the co-citation analysis; followed by clusters 2 and 4, which each had 34 documents (23.6%); followed by cluster 3, which had 32 documents (22.2%).

Figure 4.

Cocitation bibliometric map.

The first cluster (n = 44) is best described as the Methodological Applications Cluster. We chose this characterization because the majority of the documents were of the theoretical or methodological variety. For example, the highest cited article in the first cluster was Solórzano and Yosso’s (2002)“Critical Race Methodology: Counter-Storytelling as an Analytical Framework for Education Research.” Other notable foundational methods scholarship present in cluster 1 include: Lincoln and Guba (1985), Solórzano and Yosso (2002), and Miles and Huberman (1994).

The second cluster (n = 34) represents the Legal and Education Policy Foundations Cluster, as there are notable contributions from legal scholars such as Derrick Bell and Kimberlé W. Crenshaw. Specifically, the cluster published nine documents (26.5%) by legal scholars. Many of the remaining documents were policy studies that tended to reference much of the legal doctrines as substantiation for their work in education. The third cluster is best characterized as the Pedagogical Applications Cluster.

The third cluster (n = 32) consists mainly of scholarship indicative of the classroom practices and pedagogy reflecting the CRT tenets. Notably, many of the scholarly works present in this cluster were books, while other clusters consisted primarily of peer-reviewed journal articles. It is important to note that some of these texts were in circulation before CRT, but they reflect CRT’s timeless and transcending nature. For instance, Freire’s (1996)Pedagogy of the Oppressed is in this cluster. Other pedagogical texts included in this cluster were: The Dream Keepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children (Ladson-Billings, 1994); Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (Delpit, 1995); Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice (Gay, 2018); Black Teachers on Teaching (Foster, 1997); The Evolution of Deficit Thinking: Educational Thought and Practice (Valencia, 1997); and Start Where You Are, But Don’t Stay There (Milner, 2010). It would be remiss not to acknowledge that the aforementioned texts are foundational textbooks in many culturally pluralistic teacher education programs.

Finally, cluster 4 (n = 34) represents the Theoretical Foundations of Race and CRT Cluster. This cluster contains several books dedicated to the foundations of CRT and race, including: Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education (Taylor et al., 2009); Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (Stefancic & Delgado, 2000); Handbook of Critical Race Theory in Education (Lynn & Dixson, 2013); and Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? (Tatum, 1997). This cluster reflects a relative balance between books and peer-reviewed articles compared to other clusters, with a focus on how CRT can help to explicate and mediate societal challenges related to race and race relations.

Social Network Analysis

The map also includes connections between documents that are further explicated through SNA. Our focus was on centrality or influence within the network. The degree centrality for CRT co-citations ranges from 0.50 to 1.00, or 72 to 143 direct connections between documents. Seven documents have degree centralities of 1, which indicates these documents were connected to all of the documents in the network. The mean centrality was 0.85 (SD = 0.01). The betweenness centrality was approximately 0 for all the network actors. Thus, the range and mean were approximately 0. This suggests that all of the actors have approximately the same amount of betweenness centrality. The closeness centrality ranged from 0.67 to 1.00. Eleven documents had a closeness centrality of 1. A closeness centrality of 1 indicates that an actor is at the center of a star graph. Moreover, the mean closeness centrality was 0.88 (SD = 0.01). The overall centralities were 15.42% for degree centrality, 25.24% for closeness centrality, and approximately 0% for betweenness centrality.

Keyword Co-Occurrence Analysis

Finally, we explored notable lines of inquiry in CRT educational research. The keyword co-occurrence analysis revealed four thematic lines of inquiry within the CRT educational literature. Appropriately, critical race theory was the highest occurring keyword (n = 1,022), followed by education (n = 380), race (n = 254), students (n = 201), and racism (n = 177). Figure 5 presents a word cloud based on the keyword co-occurrence counts.

Figure 5.

Keyword occurrence word cloud.

The keyword co-occurrence heat map presented in Figure 6 displays the concentration of each occurrence of all the keywords and their connection to other network members. The darkness of each circle reflects the relative frequency of times the term appears as a co-occurring keyword in the primary studies of CRT in education literature. Understandably, CRT is at the center of the network and seems to connect to all the other networks. It is also part of the largest cluster of keywords, which represents the primary focus of scholarship in the field. The findings revealed a total of 5,275 keywords; however, for the purpose of the present study, we focused on keywords with a minimum of 20 co-occurrences in CRT-referenced articles since 1994. The most frequent keywords cluster around the central tenets of CRT.

Figure 6.

Keyword co-occurrence heat map.

Moreover, there are four keyword co-occurrence clusters presented in Table 2. Cluster 1 is best characterized as the foundational or core lines of CRT educational inquiry cluster. Cluster 1 is the largest cluster with 31 keywords and is considered the broadest and most prominent because it includes the keyword critical race theory and other broad categories of terms related to applying the CRT tenets within educational scholarship. The top 10 co-occurring keywords in cluster 1 were CRT, race, teacher education, policy, achievement, urban education, equity, politics, and social justice. Cluster 2 includes 16 keywords and is the second largest cluster in the set. In order of co-occurrence, the highest co-occurring keywords in cluster 2 were students, experiences, diversity, microaggressions, and higher education. Hence, this cluster represents the postsecondary CRT educational line of inquiry as the keywords within this tend to center around higher education. Cluster 3 consists of 13 keywords, and the highest co-occurring words were education, racism, whiteness, pedagogy, schools, and teacher education. Given the majority of the terms presented in cluster 3 are connected to the development of future teachers, this cluster was characterized as the teacher education lines of inquiry cluster.

Table 2.

Keyword Co-Occurrence Clusters.

Note. Shading is provided to help differentiate between clusters.

The final cluster is the smallest with only seven keywords and represents lines of inquiry that are relatively emergent within education compared to the other clusters. The highest co-occurring keywords were identity, people of color, gender, and intersectionality. This cluster reflects the intersectional line of inquiry within the education-related literature with an acute focus on the intersection between gender, race/ethnicity, and other concerns typically associated with an intersectional perspective. In summary, these four clusters reflect the major lines of inquiry present in the CRT education literature.

Limitations and Considerations

The current study has numerous implications for practice and research in education; however, this study’s impact cannot be realized without first reflecting on and considering the study’s limitations. First, it is important to note that this study focused on citation frequency trends, given that citations are a longstanding measure of research impact. Yet, citation trends only represent one measure to quantify the impact of CRT, but it is relevant because academics consistently use citation metrics to gauge impact. Additionally, when considering recent publication and citation trends, recent declines may reflect an increased risk related to doing this work. For instance, as CRT has been thrust into the political landscape, many colleges and universities have become less supportive of scholars’ academic freedom, which has fostered a new sense of concern surrounding CRT scholarship (i.e., the academic cost of publishing, citing, and researching CRT). Moreover, the impact of the “vintage effect” of the natural increase in citation frequency that occurs over time is one limitation of the current study. To address this challenge, the citations were normalized, and the standardized citation rates were examined. When citation frequencies were standardized by year, there were minor discrepancies within the top 10 highest cited articles, but for the most part, the general trends remained.

Another important consideration is that only documents available in the WoS were included in this study. The WoS is one of the oldest and most reputable scholarly indices. However, the criteria for a journal included in the WoS often reflect the same systemic and systematic exclusionary practices that CRT seeks to address. For instance, the WoS is a prime example of a system built under the guise of meritocracy, but databases such as the WoS can use its standards and procedures to exclude journals. Furthermore, libraries typically purchase and retain journals based on university usage, which often places multicultural and other critical scholarly journals at risk of being removed from the library each year due to a lack of usage measured by the annual volume of downloads recorded. This is problematic because scholars studying CRT do not reflect the majority of educational researchers in most colleges and universities; thus, universities often lack a representative number of journals centralizing CRT in their available catalog. The lack of access to journals publishing CRT research within education strongly impacts citation patterns that must also be considered in light of the present study’s findings.

Discussion

To critique the faulty logic of present efforts to demonize CRT, we employed QuantCrit, a fusion of quantitative methodologies with CRT principles, to perform a bibliometric social network analysis of CRT literature in education. Specifically, QuantCrit theorists assert that statistical analyses are not neutral, but often are influenced by the authors’ worldviews, biases, and positionalities (Gillborn et al., 2018). Moreover, QuantCrit is designed to advance new conversations about how statistical analysis can be employed to redress racial injustice (Gillborn et al., 2018, p. 169). This is made possible when QuantCrit advocates apply the experiential knowledge of people of color to provide an authentic cultural context that nuances the data interpretative process. In the following discussion, we apply QuantCrit as an interpretative framework to unpack the bibliometric trends reported in the prior section.

The usage of CRT within the field of education can be viewed through two interconnected perspectives: citation frequency and the number of publications referencing CRT. These data help us to address our first objective, which sought to identify key documents that significantly contribute to the use of CRT in the field of education. We identified 144 documents that were cited at least 50 times. These documents represent the key CRT documents impacting the field of education, and many of these texts are considered seminal works in the field of education. Accordingly, our data indicate that citation frequencies in CRT increased with the release of seminal literature on CRT. Specifically, CRT annual citations approached or surpassed 1,500 in 1995, 2008, 2009, and 2013 . In these same years, seminal scholars released timely literature that aided in (re)situating CRT, incorporating CRT in a newly developed framework to illuminate inequities, or engaged in CRT methodologies that would transform how scholars problematized issues related to race and education (Annamma et al., 2013; Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; Cooper, 2009; Harper, 2009; Harper et al., 2009; Kohli, 2009; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Milner, 2008; T. Yosso et al., 2009). Identifying these key documents based on citation frequency patterns is an initial step toward dismantling the arguments that suggest that CRT is not warranted as an academic field of inquiry.

The second objective of the present study was to document the bibliometric and thematic evolution of CRT in the field of education by identifying the connections between key documents. These bibliometric and thematic trends are a statistical reality, but a QuantCrit lens reveals connections between scholarship and social happenings impacting people of color. For instance, notwithstanding the year 1995, each increase in citation usage corresponds with a critical U.S. event that left a lasting impact on the field of education, such as the 2000 presidential election, the election and reelection of the first African American president in 2008 and 2012, the 2008 housing collapse and recession, and the 2016 election. The work of CRT as a mechanism to understand such transitions was and still is important. However, since 2009, there has been an inconsistent increase in the decline in citations, which speaks to the challenge of utilizing CRT for scholars. The contentious nature of calling out racism can be detrimental for scholars due to an inability to have their studies released by top-ranked journals, or if the article is released, the level of scrutiny toward the work and its corresponding authors could be monumental.

The frequency in which researchers have published increased their usage of CRT is not surprising. With the rise in social media, the expansive use of online formats for libraries and journals, and the construction of search engine analytics, access to documents featuring CRT has grown. However, based on a QuantCrit lens, the results pertaining to publishing frequencies also reveal a looming limitation. Specifically, the scope at which documents as publications were analyzed could have excluded certain documents that used CRT, but did not have any searchable metadata. Focusing on frequency solely as a means of calling out relevancy/exposure underscores the QuantCrit tenet that rejects the face value acceptance of data as neutral. The sociopolitical context in which these documents exist and the realities that these documents address are subjected to the well-documented racialized review process.

In conjunction, the relative decline in citation frequency for more recent documents, coupled with the rise in the number of publications, underscores the need for more understanding of the various outlets CRT is being used in outside of traditional journal formats. To raise awareness, scholars can utilize multiple non-journal outlets to elevate their work concerning CRT. This approach aligns well with the QuantCrit tenet of using numbers for social justice. Social media offers scholars a larger and interdisciplinary audience, to which particular social justice issues can be addressed and redressed immediately without the lag of the peer-review process with journals. Although this places CRT under additional scrutiny, the voice of the unheard is amplified. As discussed in the sections above, we cannot examine the bibliometric and thematic evolution of CRT scholarship divorced from the social realities that coincide with the scholarly trends.

The third objective of this study was to capture the level of centralization present in the scholarship utilizing CRT within educational contexts. Through co-citation and SNA analysis, we sought to explicate the innerworkings and relationships between these influential CRT scholarly works within the field of education. As noted previously, the top five most cited documents in order of citation count were: Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995), D. Solorzano et al. (2000), D. G. Solorzano and Bernal (2001), Gillborn (2005), and T. Yosso et al. (2009), with the Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) article cited the most. It is important to note that beyond being the most cited, these five articles were also influential members of the social network based on their relative degree and closeness centrality. All five documents had a degree centrality raw score of 143. There were 144 actors/documents in the social network; thus, a degree centrality score of 143 indicates that a document was co-cited with all of the other documents in the network. All of the five items also had standardized closeness centrality scores ranging from 0.99 to 1, indicating these actors/documents were closely nested based on the average of the shortest distances to all other actors in the network. Overall, the SNA revealed a negligible betweenness centrality or degree to which a particular actor lies on the shortest distance between actors. In context, this suggests that there was a lack of intermediate influence, possibly due to the large amount of direct connection (i.e., degree centrality) present in the network. Although race in education arguably has been a topic discussed long before, CRT as a framework in education has only existed for 25 years. For those seeking to understand the application of CRT in education, it is imperative to review and synthesize these five key articles.

Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) made apparent the need for a CRT framework in education, stemming from CRT’s original application in legal realms. This groundbreaking piece continues to be applied as a tool for understanding racial disparities in schools. The second and fifth most cited articles, D. Solorzano et al. (2000) and T. Yosso et al. (2009) used CRT as a framework for examining how African American and Latina/o college students navigated racial microaggressions within their respective universities. These articles still apply to education policy and educators because students deal with the repercussions of pending legislation and continued racism on campuses.

D. G. Solorzano and Bernal (2001) used CRT and Latina/Latino CRT as a framework for historical events of Chicana/Chicano student resistance within education. This article supplements CRT by using LatCrit to illuminate the intersectionality of various issues, such as language, immigration, ethnicity, and culture. This article maintains pertinence today as scholars, educators, and other stakeholders collaborate in their efforts toward providing ethnic studies in education. While Gillborn (2005) provided an international perspective to the discussion in his empirical analysis of education policy in England, he also presented the idea of tacit intentionality as a means to describe how race inequality in many spaces, such as schools, was not a deliberate goal of educational policy—but neither was it accidental. Together these documents represent the core of CRT scholarship, as further evidenced in the SNA.

Most germane to the present inquiry, the final research objective examined the representative lines of inquiry surrounding CRT scholarship in education by keyword co-occurrence analysis. The keyword co-occurrence analysis revealed four centralized theme clusters in CRT educational scholarship. The top term in the first theme cluster was critical race theory, followed by race, teachers’ education, policy, achievement, and urban education. The terms in this cluster focus on the type of research being conducted using CRT in education. The second cluster focuses on implementing CRT in higher education. The most frequent terms in this cluster are students, experiences, diversity, microaggressions, higher education, and Black. The third cluster includes terms that may be considered trigger phraseology (i.e., white supremacy, racism, etc.). The most frequent words in this cluster are education, racism, Whiteness, pedagogy, and schools. The arguments against CRT tend to be found in this cluster of terms because these terms challenge the dominant ideologies and claims of race neutrality, objectivity, meritocracy, colorblindness, and equal opportunity.

The keyword co-occurrence analysis reveals that CRT research has not developed, in any significant way, the themes in research related to the rationale anti-CRT advocates employ. This exposes some considerations for the misuse of CRT by advocates of Bills designed to “White wash” civics and social studies education in the United States. They claim that CRT is used to characterize all White people as racist and all Black people as victims of racism. However, data reveal that only in the third cluster do terms appear that could be considered controversial or extremist terms. When these terms are used, they are not very frequent. As we reviewed CRT in education, the trigger terms racism occurred 177 times, Whiteness occurred 172 times, and White supremacy occurred 24 times. Together these terms represent approximately only 7% of the 5,275 keywords used to describe CRT research in education. The last centralized theme, cluster 4, examined intersectionality in CRT. The most frequent terms in this cluster are identity, people of color, gender, intersectionality, and faculty. Intersectionality is one of the major tenets of CRT. Yet, counter-story telling and counternarratives, another tent of CRT, did not appear in the keyword co-occurrence analysis, which suggests that this is an area of inquiry that is either underdeveloped or under-cited by CRT scholars within the field of education.

Conclusion

The present bibliometric synthesis approach builds upon previous systematic reviews of the literature (DeCuir & Dixson, 2004; Ledesma & Calderon, 2015) that crystallized the five tenets and seven strands of CRT research, respectively. Overall, the present study’s results stand in stark contrast to the claims state legislators make to justify enacting anti-CRT bills in states such as Florida, Texas, Idaho, Utah, and Georgia. For instance, Idaho House Bill No. 377 states:

The Idaho legislature finds that tenets…, often found in “critical race theory,”…, exacerbate and inflame divisions on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or other criteria in ways contrary to the unity of the nation and the well-being of the state of Idaho and its citizens.

The present contentious sociopolitical context will likely continue to fuel anti-CRT movements. Similar statements are found in most anti-CRT Bills conservative state legislators have passed. Each falsely links CRT with virtually every form of social discord in the United States. These claims were put forth to justify legislation to protect primarily White students and teachers from curriculum and professional development contrived to be influenced by CRT. Unfortunately, the empirical impact of CRT on the landscape of education has been overshadowed by politicized discussions such as those presented above. Here we sought to recenter CRT as a scholarly critique of the systemic racism present within the U.S. education system by examining the bibliometric trends present in the CRT scholarship within the field of education. The results of the bibliometric analysis indicate that CRT is a prominent interdisciplinary line of inquiry within the field of education as measured by the volume of publications and overall citation frequency trends.

Specifically, based on less than two decades of data, CRT has amassed over 1,400 scholarly works that have been cited over 20,000 times in the field of education. This is notable given that scholars from underrepresented populations in the field of education conducted and cited much of this work . In conclusion, former President Trump’s statements and actions are the foundation of the current anti-CRT policies being implemented and suggested in various states (i.e., Idaho, Texas). However, as the citation, co-citation, SNA, and keyword co-occurrence analyse s all indicate, CRT in education is a highly complex theoretical framework that guides a burgeoning line of inquiry in education. Thus, we hope this study better explicates CRT’s role as a guide to inform educational praxis by highlighting the bibliometric trends that undergird the intellectual and thematic structure of CRT research in education.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jamaal Young

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