The use of the term well-being has increased exponentially in the public, policy, and research discourses in recent decades (Ereaut & Whiting 2008; McLeod & Wright, 2015; NLA 2014; Sointu 2005). Well-being has been generally defined through two perspectives. The hedonic perspective conceptualizes well-being based on obtaining pleasure and avoidance of pain and emphasizes concepts such as satisfaction with life, happiness, positive affect, and low negative affect (Kahneman, & Schwarz, 1999). The eudaimonic perspective interprets well-being as a full functioning of a person through concepts such as the perception of a life with meaning, self-actualization, and purposefulness (Ryan & Deci, 2001; Ryff & Singer, 2008).

Hedonic and eudaimonic perspectives of well-being offer policy-makers and practitioners alternative frameworks to the traditional medical model of individual illness and psychopathology, which have fostered the proliferation of a wide range of interventions to improve the mental health and well-being of people in different contexts. In this sense, schools have been lately perceived as a setting that is particularly appropriate for the promotion of mental health and well-being of children and adolescents (see Visani, Albieri, & Ruini, 2014, for a summary of school-based interventions), as they provide a "'captive audience' for social interventions to address the problem of youth mental health, of well-being as a means to tackle growing concerns about academic outcomes, and of well-being as key to the socialization of the whole person." (Chapman, 2015, p. 144). Chapman (2015) further argues that, beyond improving the physical and psychological health of young people, well-being can and should be understood as an acceptable goal for schooling, comparable to other goals such as equity, citizenship, or social cohesion.

Derived from the belief that schools are optimal places to promote the well-being of children and adolescents and that the promotion of child well-being is a legitimate objective of the educational system, the interest in the study of the well-being of children and adolescents in school contexts has grown exponentially in the last decades. Naturally, as empirical evidence continues accumulating, researchers have begun to critically analyze and summarize the literature in this field to offer researchers, educators, and policymakers a general picture of the current state and the advances in the field.

Bibliometric studies have been proposed as a valuable approach to summarize and classify existing research on a given field. A few studies have recently used bibliometric techniques to map the research literature in the field of well-being (e.g., Dominko & Verbič 2018a; Dominko & Verbič 2018b; Hendriks et al., 2018; Sánchez-García, Vargas-Morúa, & Hernández-Sánchez, 2018). However, and despite the growing interest in child well-being research in school settings, no study to date has summarized and categorized the existing literature using bibliometric methodologies.

This descriptive bibliometric study aims to fill this gap by mapping the international research conducted in the area of well-being and schooling using bibliometric data from Web of Science (WoS) database for the period 1984-2016. More specifically, this paper examines the publication and citation trends of well-being and schooling research over the last 30 years. In addition, this study identifies the key authors, institutions, and countries leading the research on this field, as well as the core journals where research on wellbeing and schooling is published. Moreover, this paper examines the collaborative research networks between researchers, institutions, and countries in the field of well-being and schooling. Finally, this study uncovers the disciplines serving as the foundation for research on well-being and schooling.

To achieve these goals, the author used a bibliometric approach and metadata extracted from a systematic literature search in Web of Science (WoS) database. WoS covers more than 18.000 journals in the fields of science, social sciences, humanities and the arts and storages more than 1.3 billion sources published from 1900's to date (Thomson and Reuters, 2017). In order to create a representative corpus of documents for the investigation, three key terms were imputed in the WoS database: TITLE: [“wellbeing” OR “well-being”] AND TOPIC [school*] NOT TOPIC [university OR higher education or adult] Timespan: 1984-2016 Indexes: SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, A&HCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, ESCI. In order to get the maximum number of relevant papers, OR joins were used between keywords. Furthermore, different possible combinations of keywords were also searched to further sense check the results to avoid unnecessary exclusions of important papers. The search, which spanned from 1984 to 2016 and included all the resources in database for this period of time, yielded a total of 1177 publications, representing the corpus of the literature in the field of well-being and schooling over a period of 30 years. The majority of publications in the database were journal articles (85%). The remnant included proceedings papers (5%), meeting abstracts (4%), reviews (3%), book reviews (1.5%), editorial material (1%), and corrections and book chapters (0.5%). Data were analyzed using the VOSViewer software. First, frequency counts of the number of publications and citations across years were used to describe dynamic growths of publication and citation data. Second, ranked order frequencies of publication and citation data were used to identify most influential publications, core journals, and leading authors, countries and institutions in the field. Third, co-authorship network analyses were conducted to examine networks of scientific collaboration between authors, institutions, and countries in well-being and schooling research. Finally, a co-citation network analysis of the journals included in the database was performed to identify the disciplines serving as the foundation for research on well-being and schooling.

Results evidenced that well-being and schooling is a young research area that is approximately 30 years old. The growth of publications and citations during that period, gradual at first and exponential over the last decade, demonstrates the typical patterns of an emerging discipline. A total of 3166 authors affiliated with 1044 institutions from 80 countries were responsible for all publications in the database. Ordered-rank frequencies of the number of publications and citations by authors and institutions indicated that the most productive and influential researchers and organizations had a diverse geographic background and came from different countries in Europe, North America, Australasia, and East Asia. The United States clearly led the production of research on well-being and schooling and can be considered the most influential country in terms of the number of citations received, followed by two other English-speaking countries, the United Kingdom and Canada. Co-authorship network analyses showed that researchers in the area of ​​well-being and schooling tend to work usually alone or in small groups, although some collaborative research networks at researcher and institution levels seem to exist. Most are formed, however, within national borders or between institutions that are geographically nearby. The co-citation network analysis of the journals included in the database clearly showed that well-being and schooling is an interdisciplinary research area that draws on the knowledge generated from six interconnected disciplines and subdisciplines: (1) general psychology, educational psychology, and social psychology; (2) social sciences, including sociology, economics, family studies, and demography; (3) developmental psychology; (4) general health, pediatrics, psychiatry, and public, environmental, and occupational health; (5) applied psychology; and (6) mental health, clinical and health psychology. Finally, the findings are discussed and the implications for the development of the field are presented.

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