Incidental vocabulary learning: A scientometric review

Abstract

Research on incidental vocabulary learning has gained increasing attention in language acquisition. With growing empirical evidence, traditional reviews have attempted to provide incidental vocabulary learning narrative and summary effects. However, a detailed analysis of publication trends and their dynamics is necessary to comprehensively understand the field's developments. Consequently, a scientometric review was conducted using 547 journal articles published between 2003 and 2023 from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The analysis explored developments through three lenses: performance, document co-citation, and structural variation. Through performance analysis, prominent journals, affiliate universities, and authors who increasingly contributed to the field were identified. The document co-citation analysis revealed several major clusters, of which the top six were scrutinised. Findings highlighted recurrent themes such as the importance of topic familiarity, glosses, and input modality. Moreover, influential articles and their linkages were evaluated through structural variation analysis, and their key findings and citation bursts revealed frontier trends. Finally, limitations in empirical data were discussed to elicit future research directions. As an early attempt at a scientometric analysis of incidental vocabulary acquisition, these findings will be highly beneficial to language researchers, teachers, and teacher educators, not only for identifying potential research areas but also for adapting strategies for vocabulary instruction.