Teacher Compensation and the Sustainability of the Education Workforce: A Bibliometric Analysis

This study maps global research on teacher compensation and the sustainability of the education workforce and examines compensation's position within educational sustainability discourse. Educational sustainability is defined as the capacity of education systems to maintain service quality and continuity, whereas workforce sustainability refers to their capacity to attract, support, and retain teachers without eroding well-being, motivation, or commitment. A bibliometric analysis was conducted on 476 Scopus-indexed articles published in 2014-2024 using a PRISMA-based procedure, Bibliometrix, and VOSviewer. Publications increased after 2020; sustainability, education, engagement, and digital-transformation themes dominated, while explicit compensation terms remained peripheral. Workload, motivation, leadership, professional development, and program evaluation served as bridging themes. Peripherality does not imply low substantive importance; it reflects a conceptual and disciplinary separation between pedagogy- and technology-oriented research and HRM and labor-economics research. The study's intellectual contribution is to extend Sustainable HRM into education by conceptualizing compensation as a workforce-sustainability mechanism operating through fairness, recognition, workload-reward reciprocity, well-being, commitment, and retention.