Social and Pedagogical Conditions for Adaptation of Preschool Children with Special Educational Needs to an Inclusive Environment Through Games: Bibliometric Mapping of the Literature (1975-2025)

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to map the scientific landscape of research on the social and pedagogical conditions that support the adaptation of children with special educational needs to inclusive preschool environments through play based interventions. The analysis covers the period from 1975 to 2025 and is based on metadata from 4,461 journal articles indexed in the Web of Science database. The bibliometric analysis was conducted following the PRISMA framework. The study examined trends in publication growth, author productivity, and the social, intellectual, and conceptual structures of the research field. The main findings reveal that research on the adaptation of children with special educational needs in inclusive preschool environments has steadily increased over the past decades, with particularly strong growth between 2008 and 2012. Publications appear across a wide range of journals, mainly within the areas of educational research, special education, and rehabilitation. Scholars from many regions contribute to this field, with the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States emerging as leading contributors. The analysis also indicates that the research community is relatively fragmented, consisting of several research groups with limited interaction among them. Overall, the field is interdisciplinary, integrating perspectives from education, medicine, and psychology. Over the past 50 years, major research themes have included nosological aspects of special education, academic achievement and educational outcomes, age related and institutional aspects of special education, early childhood and preschool education, collaboration and partnership in education, conceptual foundations of inclusive pedagogy, and teacher professional competence in inclusive education.