La producción científica en Educación Inclusiva: avances y desafíos

This review article aims to trace the development of inclusive education as a research object taking as a reference the scientific production generated since the Salamanca Declaration with a view to assess both the achievements and the challenges ahead so that we may prioritize our actions and define our future agenda accordingly. In order to do so, a bibliometric analysis, based on the parameters of authorship, journal and scientific article, has been carried out of those Spanish-language studies focusing on inclusive education from the year 1994 up until now, published in Scopus database indexed journals. The results drawn from our analysis evince five main findings, namely, that these studies are still scarce; that their authors pursue their research under the university institutional umbrella; that they mostly work either individually or in small teams of not more than three members; that the availability and visibility of their outcomes are very limited because there are still few open-access publications and they are published in journals which are not prominent in the Scimago Journal Rank (SJR); and, finally, that they have largely seen the light in the last ten years and have been cited only once or not at all, which reveals that their relevance for subsequent scientific studies is meagre. As a way of conclusion, we can attest to the import of the initiatives taken in this area of research, even if it is still much necessary to keep on facing numerous challenges which, albeit not exempt from obstacles, are at the same time filled with opportunities and constitute unprecedented stimuli for action, reflection, and educational engagement.