Abstract

Research on K-12 mathematics teachers’ creative teaching competence (CTC) now appears across education, mathematics, and educational psychology, but the field still lacks a coherent map. We close that gap with a bibliometric analysis of 1,204 English-language journal articles drawn from OpenAlex on 23 July 2026. We pair performance analysis, which covers publication trends, countries, institutions, journals, and authors, with science mapping built on co-authorship and keyword co-occurrence networks, greedy-modularity clustering, and emerging-term detection. A PRISMA-style diagram sets out the search and screening workflow, and a known-item test confirms that the corpus captures the core literature. The field falls into three developmental stages: dormancy (1954–2005), development (2006–2015), and prosperity (2016–2023), identified by fitting annual publication counts to separate growth curves. Output accelerates alongside the spread of digital and AI-related research, though only as an association, not a proven cause. Indonesia, the United States, and the United Kingdom lead in volume, while author collaboration remains sparse (author-network density ≈ 0.00098; core authors account for only 16% of output) and no core-author group has consolidated. Six keyword clusters group into three hotspot domains: the conceptualisation of mathematical creativity, technology- and AI-supported pedagogy, and the development of teacher competence. What we offer is a transparent, reproducible knowledge base that sorts what is settled from what is contested, and that points to where future CTC research in mathematics education should turn next.