Reflection on Global Scientific Legacy of Educational Management

The purpose of this study is to investigate knowledge generation in the field of Educational Leadership and Management (ELM) which used citation analysis as a scientometrics technique. The research population is ELM authors’ productions indexed in web of science (WOS) between 1900 and 2015. Using main references such as ELM encyclopedias, handbooks, thesauri, dictionaries and suggested sources by professors for data gathering, fifty important keywords were identified and searched in WOS. Collected data were analyzed by HISTCITE software. The research results show a total numbers of 9,385 documents produced by 14,994 authors, using 216,815 references in eighteen different formats (Article, critique, book review, etc.). These documents are written in 26 languages by participation of 3,876 institutes from 118 countries. Most of the produced documents are research-oriented and published by 2,468 journals. The “Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ)” and “Teachers College Record” journals are the most productive and effective journals respectively. The first article published in scientific journals produced by Samuel Dutton in 1900 and the most productive and effective authors are Philip Hallinger and Ronald Heck respectively. The rate of ELM scientific growth is 21.42% and more than 90% of documents have been produced in the last four decades. The most number of articles (6,365) have been produced in 2013. London University with 118 products is the most active scientific institute and USA with 2,474 works (26% of total documents), is the most productive country in the world. The article ends with some suggestions.