Research data supporting "Critical thinking, creative thinking, systems thinking and many more: a comparative bibliometric analysis of prevalence and distribution"

['Readme' information is provided on the first sheet of the file.] This data was generated for a research project aimed at comparing the discourse surrounding many ways of thinking, such as critical thinking, creative thinking and systems thinking. Two sets of research questions were addressed: 1. Prevalence. How often are they referred to, separately and in combination, and how has this changed over time? 2. Distribution. How widely and evenly are they referred to across different disciplines and application areas? The data were drawn from the ‘Dimensions Analytics’ database from Digital Science: https://www.dimensions.ai/ Between February and June 2025, the database was repeatedly searched for documents including different terms in different document locations and date windows; no other filters were applied. The units of analysis were individual documents, which are here considered micro-level outputs of research. The main bibliometric method used was performance analysis based on the count of total documents returned by each search query. All publication types and document types were included, and only document quantity indicators were used, not quality or structure indicators. In addition to standardisation and normalisation of the data, calculations were performed to determine the Pearson correlation coefficient and Gini coefficient.