Exploring Peer Effect in Educational Choices: The Missing Tie

Many disciplines and theoretical approaches have addressed the peer effect on educational choices. This article offers a review and critical reading of the scientific literature to identify the main research groups and domains that have analyzed the influence of peers on educational decisions. To this end, the bibliometric approach has been used throughout a specific query, later refined to include only articles belonging to relevant scholarly categories such as sociology, social psychology, and education. Early findings show that the Groningen University research group is a key reference in the study of peer effects in education and social network analysis. Scientific publications on these topics are growing steadily, with a significant acceleration after 2004. The co-occurrence analysis of keywords, instead, reveals thematic clusters–social dynamics, education, healthcare, policy, human capital, and network methods–highlighting the need for an interdisciplinary approach to understand peer effects and their implications.