Digital Technologies in Music Education: A Citation-Prioritized Bibliometric and Science Mapping Analysis of a Manually Screened OpenAlex Corpus (2000-2025)

Digital technologies have transformed the pedagogical, methodological, and professional foundations of music education. Yet the international research landscape remains unevenly structured across technological domains, publication sources, and geographical regions. This study presents a citation-prioritized bibliometric and science mapping analysis of digital technologies in music education using metadata retrieved from the OpenAlex Works API. The initial search for 2000-2026 identified 14,563 records. After automatic filtering by title, keywords, topics, and source relevance, 2,096 candidate records remained. A citation-prioritized manual screening procedure was then applied to 300 records; after relevance coding and metadata matching, 247 publications from 2000-2025 were retained for final analysis. Descriptive bibliometric indicators, PRISMA-based selection reporting, keyword co-occurrence mapping, country collaboration analysis, and source thematic similarity mapping were used. The results show a strong increase in publication activity after 2020, with peak output in 2022 and 2023. China dominated the corpus, while Central Asian representation was almost absent. The cleaned keyword structure was organized around pedagogy, multimedia, music education, artificial intelligence, music technology, human-computer interaction, information and communications technology, curriculum, and educational technology. The study contributes to the literature by positioning digital music education as an interdisciplinary field that connects TPACK-based technology integration, educator digital competence, artificial intelligence, multimedia learning, and regionally uneven knowledge production.