  E-learning has been continuously present in current educational discourse,
thanks to technological advances, learning methodologies and public or
organizational policies, among other factors. However, despite its boom and
dominance in various subject areas, this thematic does not yet exist in the
world system of publications. Therefore, works in this thematic end up being
published under related categories, particularly Education or categories within
subject area Computer Science, thus fragmenting and make invisible the existing
knowledge. This work is based on the hypothesis that the scientific
communication of e-learning has a sufficient degree of cohesion to be
considered as a thematic category in itself. From a bibliometric approach, its
scientific production was analyzed, obtaining the bibliographic data of SCOPUS
and SCImago, selecting its main descriptors and generating visualizations
through VOSViewer with the mapping overlay technique, to represent its set and
proximity. As a result, it was determined that a set of 219 publications show a
high bibliometric interrelation among its articles and these are presented
transversely between the social sciences, computer science and health. This set
serves as a channel of scientific communication and structure of knowledge on
the thematic and can therefore be considered as the basis for establishing the
"e-learning" thematic category in the world system of scientific publications,
contributing to the consolidation of the discipline, to its access and
development by researchers.
