Document Type
Article
Date of Original Version
9-6-2026
Abstract
Media literacy education is widely held to have moved from a protective to a participatory paradigm. This study asks whether the children's digital rights literature that informs it has made the same move. Records were retrieved from Web of Science and Scopus (search date 31 August 2026), screened, and deduplicated, yielding 1,012 publications from 1993 to 2026. A dictionary built on the protection–provision–participation framework of the Convention on the Rights of the Child was applied to 4,507 keywords. Protection accounted for 40.4% of classified keywords, provision for 44.4%, and participation for 15.1%. Protection exceeded participation by 2.4 to 3.1 throughout, never approaching parity. The ratio declined slowly, but not because of General Comment No. 25 (χ² = 1.607, p = .205). Protection's ceded share was absorbed by provision, not participation. Media literacy itself functions as provision in this corpus: something delivered to children rather than exercised by them.
Recommended Citation
Information Removed, Author, "From Protection to Provision, Not Participation: A Bibliometric Analysis of Children's Digital Rights Research and Its Implications for Media Literacy Education" (2026). JMLE Submissions Open for Review. Paper 9.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/jmle-ofr/9