Mapping the literature on entrepreneurial education and students’ entrepreneurial mindset and intention: A bibliometric review using the SPAR-4-SLR protocol and the TCCM framework

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education has emerged as a critical mechanism for fostering entrepreneurial competencies and intentions among university students worldwide. This study provides a comprehensive examination of the entrepreneurship education research landscape by integrating bibliometric analysis with systematic qualitative synthesis. Following the SPAR-4-SLR protocol, we analyzed 818 peer-reviewed articles published between 2005 and 2025 from Scopus, employing citation analysis, keyword co-occurrence, and collaboration network analysis. Subsequently, we conducted qualitative analysis of the 20 most cited articles using the TCCM framework to examine theoretical foundations, contextual diversity, key constructs, and methodological approaches. The findings reveal exponential growth with publication output increasing 100-fold over two decades. Theoretically, the field remains concentrated around the Theory of Planned Behavior and entrepreneurial self-efficacy, although emerging attention to entrepreneurial mindset represents a promising evolution; however, the TCCM analysis reveals that these frameworks inadequately capture the full spectrum of educational outcomes. A theoretically significant finding is that entrepreneurial mindset, encompassing opportunity awareness, tolerance for uncertainty, and cognitive adaptability, constitutes a more enduring outcome than stated intention alone, and that extracurricular activities outperform formal curricula in developing it, with entrepreneurial inspiration functioning as a key mediating mechanism. Methodologically, cross-sectional survey designs dominate while longitudinal and experimental studies remain scarce. A critical finding is that entrepreneurship education's impact on entrepreneurial intention and mindset is fundamentally context dependent, varying substantially across cultural settings, disciplinary backgrounds, and gender. Entrepreneurial self-efficacy consistently mediates the relationship between education and intention. By integrating large-scale bibliometric mapping with TCCM-based qualitative synthesis, this research provides comprehensive insights into field evolution, identifies persistent theoretical and methodological limitations, and offers a research agenda for bridging the intention-action gap, a structural blind spot invisible to individual studies. The findings suggest that effective entrepreneurship education requires context-sensitive approaches developing entrepreneurial mindset through experiential learning, exposure to role models, and gender-inclusive pedagogies.