A bibliometric analysis of Community of Inquiry in online learning contexts over twenty-five years

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, online learning has gained popularity among educators and learners, where Community of Inquiry (CoI) has caught researchers’ attention. To bibliometrically analyze the framework of CoI over twenty-five years, we adopted both qualitative and quantitative research methods to examine the framework of CoI in online learning contexts. We concluded that teaching presence, social presence, cognitive presence, metacognition, and self-efficacy played important roles in the framework of CoI. This study also explored the top ten authors, sources, organizations, and countries using VOSviewer and established citation networks through the clustering techniques in CitNetExplorer. Future research could focus on how to motivate the educational institutes and educators to change their traditional educational methods and whether to include both metacognition and self-efficacy in the CoI framework.