Of the many thinking skills, which ones receive the most attention?

This tree map represents the current prevalence (or popularity) of different terms in the research literature.

Each rectangle is scaled according to the prevalence of the associated term in the title or abstract of research documents over a recent five-year period (2020-2024). By this measure of prevalence, the top-five thinking skills are critical thinking, design thinking, creative thinking, systems thinking and computational thinking.

Some terms are much more prevalent than others, so it can be useful to filter them by their ranking. Otherwise, some of the less popular terms aren't visible at all (even if the pop-ups describe them). In many of the other representations presented here, the top-20 thinking skills are emphasised.

The tree map represents the recent prevalence of each term, but how has that prevalence changed over time?

This chart represents the changing prevalence of 20 different terms over the previous 50 years.

Again, some terms are much more prevalent than others, with critical thinking dominating the raw document counts. Selecting individual terms of interest permits them to be seen and compared. Alternatively, displaying the normalised proportions converts each trend line into a measure of how that term's current prevalence was reached (compared to the global publication rate, which generally increases over time). For example, compare the recent rise to prominence of design thinking with the relatively flat curve for strategic thinking.

Although the terms analysed here are well known, and sometimes compared, their prevalence can also usefully be compared with other closely associated terms. Take design thinking as an example:

This set of charts represents the changing prevalence of design thinking in comparison with terms commonly associated with it.

In the previous visualisations, the prevalence of critical thinking dominated. However, for some of these thinking skills there are related popular terms that don't adopt the same naming format: "x thinking". To illustrate this, the above chart compares the changing prevalence of design thinking to six terms commonly associated with it: problem solving, problem framing, innovation process, user-centred, idea generation and iterative development. The time period and document types are the same, and critical thinking is again included, for context.

Notably, problem solving is even more prevalent than critical thinking. However, in comparison to design thinking's suddenly rising prevalence (after about 2005), problem solving exhibits a more gradual rise over this time period. This is especially apparent in the normalised view. The next term with comparable prevalence to design thinking is user-centred, which begins to rise in prevalence about a decade before design thinking.

Except for this last set of charts, the data presented on this page are more fully reported in a bibliometric analysis, the details of which can be found on the About page.