Digital Innovations for Educator Well-Being - A Scientometric Review of Virtual Reality Applications in Stress Reduction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53840/e-jpi.v13i2.431Keywords:
Virtual Reality (VR), Educator Well-Being, Scientometric Review, Stress Reduction, Digital InnovationsAbstract
The intersection of digital innovation and educator psychological well-being represents one of the most dynamic and consequential frontiers in contemporary educational research, as global concerns over teacher burnout, occupational stress, and mental health crises within academic institutions continue to intensify. This paper presents a scientometric review of 1,406 Scopus-indexed publications spanning a decade of scholarship from 2016 to 2026, systematically charting the intellectual evolution, structural composition, and thematic orientation of research at the nexus of virtual reality (VR), extended reality (XR), and educator well-being. The trajectory of publication growth reveals a field in accelerating ascent — from a modest 13 documents in 2016 to an extraordinary 406 in 2025 — a pattern mirroring the broader global digital health revolution catalysed, in part, by the COVID-19 pandemic and its lasting disruption to educational environments. The United States (23.8%), China (11.9%), and the United Kingdom (9.4%) anchor the global research landscape, though notable contributions from Malaysia, Australia, Germany, and Spain signal a rapidly diversifying geographic base. The inherently cross-disciplinary nature of this field, spanning Social Sciences, Medicine, Computer Science, Psychology, Engineering, and Nursing, positions VR-based well-being research as a genuinely hybrid domain bridging pedagogy, clinical psychology, and human-computer interaction. Thematically, the corpus encompasses keywords across both the technological (virtual reality, augmented reality, digital health, metaverse) and the psychological (anxiety, burnout, mental health, stress, resilience), illustrating the field's dual commitment to technological innovation and human-centered outcomes, with leading journals including Frontiers in Psychology, BMJ Open, and the Journal of Medical Internet Research serving as primary dissemination platforms. Collectively, this scientometric synthesis establishes a comprehensive intellectual map of VR-mediated educator well-being research, identifies foundational knowledge clusters and emerging thematic gaps, and provides evidence-based guidance for researchers, technology developers, educational policymakers, and institutional administrators seeking to harness digital innovations in support of educator mental health and professional sustainability.
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