Purpose – Competence, which generally refers to being able to do things in real-world contexts, has attracted the interest of educational researchers for over half a century. It spans all levels of education, diverse life and professional domains and key aspects of educational implementation – curriculum, learning, instruction and assessment. Although a considerable research domain, it has remained heavily understudied. We address this gap by mapping the main traditions of competence research to provide the first comprehensive overview for researchers, policymakers and practitioners. Design/methodology/approach – We applied direct citation network analysis (DCNA) with mapping, clustering and visualization to a robust sample of 14, 546 competence studies to identify the main traditions of competence research. We extended the analysis with term co-occurrence analysis (TCA) to gain insights into the topics that the research traditions have focused on over time. Findings – We identified four main traditions in competence research – healthcare education, general education, language and intercultural education and developmental and educational psychology – alongside emerging topics such as simulation-based learning, digital competence, intercultural communicative competence and emotions. We examine their scopes, historical development, key works and journals, major debates and research topics. Originality/value – This study presents the first comprehensive overview of competence research using state-of-the-art bibliometric methods. Our results and openly available data provide researchers, policymakers and practitioners with a structured, intuitive and visual knowledge map of competence research that supports rapid understanding of this complex domain and helps efficiently locate research-based knowledge on relevant subtopics. © 2025 Joonas Mannonen, Danial Hooshyar, Felipe Urrutia, Raija Hämäläinen, Roberto Araya and Sami Lehesvuori
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