Malaysia’s Blended Learning Research Boom Revealed in Decade-Long Bibliometric Map

Malaysian research on blended learning has grown steadily over the past decade, but a new bibliometric analysis shows that this expansion has been strikingly uneven. A study published in Discover Education examined 68 peer-reviewed journal articles on blended learning in Malaysia indexed in the Scopus database between 2015 and 2025, mapping publication trends, collaboration networks, keyword clusters, citation patterns, and the shared reference bases that connect the field. The timing of the analysis is significant.

Malaysia's Education Blueprint 2013–2025 explicitly calls for greater use of information and communications technology to make learning more interactive and personalized, and blended learning—defined as the combination of face-to-face and online instruction—has moved from a supplementary approach to a mainstream pedagogical strategy in Malaysian higher education. The COVID-19 pandemic then accelerated the shift by forcing rapid adoption of digital platforms for instructional delivery. The study period, 2015 to 2025, was chosen because no Scopus-indexed studies on blended learning in Malaysia appeared in 2013 or 2014, making 2015 the start of measurable research activity while still aligning with the Blueprint's strategic window.

Methodologically, the researchers followed PRISMA-guided screening of Scopus records. A search executed on June 20, 2025 initially retrieved 112 articles. Fourteen were excluded for not focusing on the Malaysian educational context, and 30 more were removed at full-text assessment—18 for being conference abstracts or book chapters, six for being non-English publications, and six for lacking sufficient bibliographic metadata for analysis in VOSviewer.

The final corpus of 68 English-language, peer-reviewed journal articles or reviews represents the complete eligible set retrieved through the specified search strategy. The authors deliberately excluded broader terms such as e-learning and online learning, since those describe fully online instruction without the face-to-face component that defines blended pedagogy. The publication trend shows a clear upward trajectory.

Output remained modest between 2015 and 2018, with four to five publications per year, then increased substantially in 2019 and stayed comparatively high afterward, rising again in 2022 with strong output in 2023 and 2024. The authors caution that these temporal patterns coincide with national education reforms and the pandemic but that bibliometric data alone cannot establish causal relationships. The lower count for 2025 should also be read cautiously, since the year was incomplete at data extraction and some publications may not yet have been indexed.

Subject-area analysis showed Social Sciences dominating with roughly 46 articles, followed by Computer Science with about 18 and Engineering with around 12, while Medicine and Health Professions contributed a smaller but notable share and fields such as Economics, Physics, and Biochemistry registered only one or two articles each. Authorship analysis revealed a small, highly visible group of scholars. Five authors each published four articles over the decade: Abdullah of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Baba of Universiti Teknologi MARA, Kamaludin of Universiti Sains Malaysia, Romli of Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, and Wong of Universiti Malaya.

Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris led institutional output with 11 articles, followed by Universiti Teknologi MARA and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia with eight each. Co-authorship mapping, using a threshold of two documents per author, produced a network of 10 authors and 45 links, with a densely connected cluster centered on authors such as Abdullah and Leong acting as core connectors. The authors note that this concentration suggests dedicated research teams but also a potential narrowing of theoretical and methodological diversity when agendas are shaped by a limited set of recurring collaborators.

Keyword co-occurrence analysis, based on author keywords appearing at least twice, yielded 17 keywords across five thematic clusters. The first cluster centers on instructional modalities, linking blended learning with online learning, flipped classroom, learning management systems, distance education, and MOOCs. The second captures technology adoption and integration, featuring acceptance, usefulness, and structural equation modelling—a prominence the authors interpret as a field leaning toward intention-based perception measures rather than classroom process evidence.

The third cluster addresses effectiveness and pedagogical outcomes, the fourth covers contexts and stakeholders such as undergraduates, pharmacy, and medical education, and the fifth consists of COVID-19 as a single but significant node connected to distance education, reflecting the pandemic's role in driving scholarly attention to emergency remote teaching and blended delivery. Citation analysis identified the field's most visible publications. Azlan and colleagues recorded the highest count with 151 citations, followed by Anthony and colleagues with 102 and Maloney and colleagues with 93.

Choi and Bokolo recorded 52 and 51 citations respectively, while two more recent publications each received 30. The authors stress that citation counts indicate scholarly visibility within Scopus and should not be read as direct measures of educational or practical impact. Bibliographic coupling, restricted to the 17 publications with at least eight citations, produced a network of 34 links with a total link strength of 190, revealing a tightly coupled intellectual core formed between 2019 and 2021 alongside less integrated strands from more recent publications.

One of the study's central contributions is the distinction it draws between thematic expansion and reference-base consolidation. The corpus has broadened from early work on blended delivery, learner perceptions, and technology acceptance toward readiness, engagement, system adoption, and post-pandemic hybrid learning, yet the shared reference structure remains comparatively concentrated. The authors emphasize that bibliographic coupling does not by itself establish that connected publications share theoretical frameworks, which would require qualitative content analysis.

They also connect the observed patterns to established theory: the focus on tools and modes aligns with the TPACK framework of Mishra and Koehler, perception and engagement studies align with constructivist perspectives, and adoption patterns fit Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation theory. The analysis also exposes significant gaps. Research is heavily concentrated in higher education, particularly medical, pharmacy, and professional programs, while primary and secondary school implementation remains scarce—a gap the authors note has been flagged in prior Malaysian work on primary school contexts.

Rural and under-resourced settings, digital equity, accessibility, and digital literacy disparities are largely underexamined. The authors suggest the higher education dominance may reflect structural conditions such as stronger research infrastructure, established ethics procedures, and publication incentives, meaning the pattern reflects unequal research visibility as much as research reality. Regional comparisons with Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand are offered as differences in research emphasis rather than direct performance comparisons, since databases and criteria differ.

The authors acknowledge limitations, including the Scopus-only design, which introduces database-selection bias and may omit work indexed in Web of Science, ERIC, MyCite, or local repositories, and the small corpus of 68 records, which makes network structures sensitive to threshold choices and newly indexed publications. They recommend future studies integrate multiple databases, include grey literature, and apply qualitative content analysis to key publications. For policymakers, the findings point toward supporting school-level and rural research; for institutions, toward broader cross-institutional and international collaboration; and for researchers, toward equity, access, and long-term instructional design.

The overall message is that Malaysian blended learning scholarship has matured into a structured, growing field—one whose next phase will depend on widening who participates, where the research happens, and whose classrooms it ultimately serves.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric analysis of Scopus-indexed blended learning research in Malaysia from 2015 to 2025

Article Title: Trends, collaboration, and intellectual structure of Scopus-indexed blended learning research in Malaysia from 2015 to 2025

Article References: Hong, A. L. T., Zheng, A. L. T., Stapa, M., & Tian, K. X. (2026). Trends, collaboration, and intellectual structure of Scopus-indexed blended learning research in Malaysia from 2015 to 2025. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1230. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02244-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02244-9

Keywords: blended learning, bibliometrics, Malaysia, Scopus, higher education, co-authorship, keyword co-occurrence, citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, COVID-19, educational technology, VOSviewer