Mapping the Knowledge Landscape of Career Advancement Research in the Public Sector: A Bibliometric Analysis

Career advancement in the public sector has become an important field of scholarly research as the government attempts to develop skilled and motivated civil servants who will be able to cope with emerging governance issues. While career advancement, promotion systems, leadership development, and public human resource management have attracted significant attention from scholars, little bibliometric evidence has been found on the knowledge structure of the field of research. The aim of this paper is to bridge the identified gap by conducting a bibliometric analysis of Scopus-indexed publications on career advancement published between 1999 and 2026. The study includes 57 publications that have been screened out of numerous articles based on certain inclusion criteria. Bibliometric data were analyzed using the Bibliometrix package in R with the help of the Biblioshiny interface, and VOSviewer was used for science mapping and network visualization purposes. The total number of publications included in the final dataset equals 57 publications, 48 sources, 164 authors, 4,068 citations, an annual growth rate of 5.27%, average number of authors per documents equals to 2.95. It appears that career development, public administration, civil service, human resource management, and motivation are the major conceptual fields of the research, while government-related and gender-related topics are well-developed research themes. At the same time, career management, career advancement and work-life balance can be recognized as underdeveloped or even newly developed research themes. The geographical distribution of the publications demonstrates that the research is conducted in Asia, North America, Europe and some regions of Africa. Science mapping makes it possible to see how intellectual and conceptual relations exist between influential authors, research themes and publication sources. In general, the study gives an insight into the performance, conceptual and intellectual structure of career advancement research.