Research focuses and trends in literacy within education: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to conduct a bibliometric analysis including citation performance in the research topic of literacy within education, by using an innovative method including details of article title, author keyword, KeyWords Plus, and abstracts. This novel study is to our knowledge, the first of its kind within the field of literacy and can therefore provide valuable insights for professionals and others interested in literacy in terms of who and what to read, and where to focus. Data were retrieved 17 December 202217 December 2022 from the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) of Clarivate Analytics for studies published from 1992 to 2021. To evaluate research trends, the distribution of keywords in the article title and author‑selected keywords was used. The search yielded 539 documents in SSCI, of which 489 were document-type “articles”. These articles were published in 142 journals. The analysis of the articles showed that “academic writing,” “higher education,” “writing,” and “assessment” are the most used keywords by the authors. The most frequently cited study was published in 1998 by Lea and Street. Most articles were published in English and originated in the USA and the UK. Most studies in the field of professional literacy are produced in the USA and UK, that is, countries with a long tradition of research in professional education and having English as the main language. Most publications are single-country productions because literacy, to a high extent, are local in nature.

Keywords:

• professional literacy
• vocational literacy
• occupational literacy
• academic literacy
• bibliometrics
• education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors’ contributions

NC, MC, and EA contributed to the conceptualization, methodology, and reviewing and writing of the original draft. YH contributed to data collection, analysis, and review of the manuscript. Finally, all authors read and revised the manuscript prior to submission.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.