<![CDATA[Rural and remote school systems face persistent difficulty distributing and retaining qualified teachers, yet the knowledge base remains dispersed across education policy, labor-market, and organizational research. This study maps the development, social structure, conceptual organization, and intellectual foundations of rural and remote teacher-workforce research and interprets their implications for public-service workforce governance. The systematically screened corpus comprised 478 Scopus-indexed articles and reviews published between 1957 and 2026 and retrieved on 4 August 2026. Performance analysis and thematic evolution were conducted with bibliometrix/Biblioshiny, while network mapping used VOSviewer 1.6.21. Publication output accelerated after 2019, which accounted for 70.3% of the corpus, but international co-authorship remained limited at 10.67%. The final author-keyword map contained 38 terms in six clusters, while title-abstract analysis retained 43 terms in five clusters. Both converged on distribution, shortages, recruitment, turnover, attrition, incentives, leadership, professional development, and equity. The recurrent co-authorship network was small, whereas co-citation analysis revealed a shared intellectual base centered on organizational and labor-market explanations of workforce instability. The thematic shift from recruitment toward distribution and from equity toward retention indicates that rural staffing is increasingly understood as a connected governance cycle. The study proposes an integrated framework linking workforce intelligence, preparation, allocation, workplace support, mobility, and retention, with equity as a cross-cutting outcome.]]>
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