A bibliometric analysis of scholarly literature related to digital literacy in higher education during the pandemic period

Abstract

Digital literacy has been a popular research topic in the areas of library and information science, computer science, and education. Whereas emergence of the pandemic further facilitated the exchange of these fields. This study investigated scholarly articles about digital literacy over a 4-year time span and tried to depict the future research trends in higher education after the pandemic by employing the method of science mapping and visualizing to identify the prospective themes. Through analysing the collected data, results indicated that studies of digital literacy in higher education during the pandemic mainly focused on the application, evaluation, and challenges of digital literacy faced by students and teachers, but there were other themes from the perspectives of pedagogy, psychological well-being, and equity that will be addressed more in future studies. The findings of this study provide a further understanding of research trends and are beneficial for practitioners to gain insight.

Keywords:

• Digital literacy
• bibliometric analysis
• higher education
• post-pandemic

Reviewing Editor:

• Luis Francisco Pedro, Department of Communication and Arts, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal

Subjects:

• ICT
• Adult Education and Lifelong Learning
• Higher Education

Introduction

At the beginning of 2020, when the pandemic started affecting the whole globe, many sectors of society were digitalized to maintain the normality of life. The education sector was also no exception. Digital tools and technologies were widely used in the educational sector worldwide before the pandemic. This trend was being pushed further which attracted growing attention from researchers and education practitioners. In other words, education was driven to adapt to digitalization in teaching and learning in the short term, even though flipped classrooms, MOOCs, and SPOOCs have been studied and applied in education to varying extents. However, new forms of teaching and learning tools and strategies, such as lecture recordings, mobile learning, live-streaming or asynchronous classrooms, and wearable devices entered the tertiary education landscape urgently due to lockdown or pandemic control (Wang & He, 2022). The sudden coverage of digital learning across all sectors of education can be beneficial to curb the spread of coronavirus, but the true value of utilizing these digital tools only depends on the acceptance and affordance of every user’s digital literacy (Händel et al., 2020).

During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technologies saw heightened utilization, particularly in the area of education as people must keep social distance while maintaining study and work normalcy. In light of this challenging time, students and educators must be adaptive to a rapid change in learning and teaching modes that forced them to enhance their digital literacy for an abrupt digital transformation. In the ‘digitalized’ world, almost everything is presented in a virtualized manner, particularly in the scientific research domain. Within the higher education sector, this area embraces changing trends of the technology world compared to the general public. In addition, digital literacy, information literacy, data literacy, and other technology-related skills are closely blended in education nowadays (Stopar & Bartol, 2019). Under the interruption of the pandemic and sudden change in teaching modes, students in higher education were facing many new adjustments including adapting new e-learning platforms, managing multiple study applications, and meeting changing assessment standards through distance learning. Therefore, tracing the current trend of scholarly literature within a 4-year time frame in the context of the pandemic and this digital transformation may shed light on changes in future research topics on students’ digital literacy in higher education. From a practical standpoint, it is important to gain more insight from this particular situation that informs more researchers or relevant authorities to help students and teachers in disadvantaged conditions (Händel et al., 2020).

Research questions

Specific research questions addressed in this study included:

1. What is the annual growth rate and changes in digital literacy literature from 2020 to 2023?

2. What are the prevailing and subsequent research themes and keywords in literature from 2020 to 2023?

3. What are the most active authors, organizations, and top journals in publishing digital literacy literature and the citation number received by them?

Methodology

In the present study, the bibliometrics method is employed to investigate the publishing trend and identify the surging research areas after the pandemic period. The bibliometrics method is to identify the historical development trend of a certain discipline, publishing patterns of a journal or authorship, and core journals and their usage (Matthews, 2010). It can be used to analyse the impact and citation status of individual researchers or articles, which can measure the contribution degree from these academics or different research organizations (Meyer, 2013). Furthermore, the analysis of bibliometrics is also able to spot the research gap in the current literature which can help researchers locate popular and potential topics for future research (Lowry et al., 2013).

The main purpose of this study was to propose a bibliometric analysis of literature on digital literacy, and the areas covered were: the total number of academic articles; the growth of digital literacy before and after the pandemic; most active authors and organizations; hot and potential keywords for future research. The above questions will be studied in the time frame from 2020 to 2023 (during the pandemic period). The present study employed the Scopus Database to select the publication data from 2020 to 2023. The preference for using Scopus was due to its considerably large abstracting and citation database (Shaheen Majid et al., 2015), and it provides nearly 60% more coverage than other databases (Zhao & Strotmann, 2015). According to Scopus, in 2020, it covered over 25,100 titles and 77.8 million records displaying a bigger retrieval result compared to Web of Science databases (Scopus, n.d.). Besides, Scopus provides some analytical tools that can be used to generate useful data.

The term ‘digital literacy’ was the main phrase used in the article title, abstract and keyword search. Other synonyms related to the concept of digital literacy were also included, such as ‘information literacy, computer literacy, data literacy, competency, literate, ICT’ etc., (Ala-Mutka, 2011; Stopar & Bartol, 2019), in order to maximize the retrieval data for analysis. The first search was conducted by excluding irrelevant articles that do not belong to the higher education range (related synonyms: college, university, post-secondary), and the publication year was set from 2020 to the end of 2023 as the research purpose proposed. The language of the publications was limited to English only. 591 records were found based on the search keywords. After that, a manual selection of the data was applied to reduce the noise of the search to improve the accuracy of the result. The records without actual abstracts and duplicated ones were excluded. Hence, a total of 479 articles were finalized. All publication data imported from Scopus was stored in Microsoft Excel, and then later using VOSviewer to analyse. For evaluating and monitoring the current trend and pattern of the research status in a particular scientific field for scholarly interest, the quantitative method of bibliometric analysis is employed in this study. The applied method explores the interconnection of the target journal articles by analysing their co-citation and citation statistics through other articles. Since this study aims to depict potential trends of research related to the topic of digital literacy over the period of the pandemic, the approach of bibliometric analysis, especially the co-occurrence analysis is employed. Lastly, content analysis was conducted to summarise the prevailing themes in this field through the co-occurrence analysis of VOSviewer. The application of such a method is practical to analyse a large body of literature without a subjective judgement. Compared to other traditional methods which are more biased in deciding the analysis parameters and overlooking the aspect of evolution in a scientific research area (Chawla & Goyal, 2022), the bibliometric method is believed to be the most figurative tool for similar types of studies.

Results

The following part presents research results of bibliographic analysis including the number of publications related to digital literacy, citation status, most productive authors and their organizations, distribution features of country and document type, and top cited and publishing journals.

Yearly publication and data overview

From 2020 to 2023, a total of 479 articles were produced and published. Of all the retrieved documents, 363 were journal articles (75.8%), 60 were conference papers (12.5%), 43 were book chapters (9%), 9 were review articles (11.9%), 2 were books (0.4%) and 1 was conference review (0.2%). According to the collected data, only 27 articles related to digital literacy were published in 2020. Regarding the study result of Wang and He (2022), 386 articles were published that indicated a small number of publications involving the pandemic in the higher education sector. However, 164 articles were retrieved from the database which accounted for 34% of the total publication amount of 480 articles in 2021. In 2022 and 2023, 155 and 133 articles were published respectively, which saw a robust increase particularly on the topic of COVID-19. It is evident that researchers in this field paid close attention to the influence of the pandemic and future research focus may continue to be relevant to the aftermath of post-COVID education.

Active authors and affiliations

Based on the collected data, 1458 authors participated in the production of academic articles. During this time frame, five researchers were most productive in publishing from 4 to 6 articles. Of these five researchers, Antón-Sancho Á authored and co-authored 6 articles with Vergara D. and Fernández-Arias P, who were the most productive authors in the data set. In the publications of these three researchers, the change and perception of using ICT driven by the pandemic were mainly discussed from the perspective of professors in higher education. Of the 4 articles by Boté-Vericad also concerned the barriers of distance learning, technological challenges faced by and digital divide respectively, the other one focused on the teaching practice of library and information studies. Eltahir M.E authored and co-authored 5 articles, which focused on exploring the online learning application and assessment among students during the pandemic period.

In the aspect of most productive affiliation, Tecnológico de Monterrey ranked top by owning 7 publications, followed by 2 affiliations publishing 6 articles each and the other 5 affiliations with 5 articles each. Among all 12 prolific affiliations, the selected standard is 4 articles or more and that the authors are affiliated with the organization. Meanwhile, of 5 affiliations are from Spain, 3 are from South Africa. In a brief display of the geographic distribution, there are 105 countries or regions involved in the publication. The most productive regions remain in the developed part of the world, such as Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom, which take up 24.79% of total publications, and this is illustrated in Figure 1. As shown in Table 1 of the top 15 productive countries or regions, even though 7 of them are developed countries, the rest of them are developing countries, which accounted for up to 31.31% of the total publications. According to Figure 1 generated from the VOSviewer, the result shows that there are a total of 4 clusters, and some clusters are displaying a strong geographical feature regarding the co-authorship feature. For example, the Spain cluster shares a strong connection with several European countries, which is also the largest cluster. The second largest cluster is formed by the United States sharing a strong connection with China, Spain and the United Kingdom cluster. Moreover, the strong linkage among the largest cluster also demonstrates that cross-sectional cooperation is becoming more in this research field.

Figure 1. Geographical display of most productive countries.

Table 1. Top 10 most productive countries.

Ranking	Country or region	Publications	Percentage
1	Spain	64	13.4
2	United States	48	10
3	United Kingdom	38	7.9
4	China	31	6.4
5	South Africa	27	5.6
6	Australia	26	5.4
7	Peru	19	3.9
8	Russian Federation	17	3.5
9	Portugal	16	3.4
10	Indonesia	15	3.3

Regarding the sponsorship of the publication, the top sponsors are either governmental institutions or universities (See Figure 2). For example, the European Commission and European Regional Development Fund supported 6 and 5 publications respectively which rank at the top among all the identified funding sponsors. Most of them are government agencies and universities from developed countries. It is evident that resourceful countries are more dedicated to supporting scientific research which leads to more productive publications (Huan & Guan, 2020). While European countries contributed the majority of publications, some developing countries or regions, for example, China, are devoting more to boosting the productivity of scientific research due to the association of gaining tenure, promotion and awards with the number of publications on SSCI- or SCI-indexed journals (Huan & Guan, 2020; Wang & He, 2022).

Figure 2. Top 12 funding sponsors.

Most productive journals and subject categories

As illustrated in Figure 3, the prior 15 journals ranking in the top accounted for 108 publications, taking up 30.4% of the total search results. On top of the list, two journals: Sustainability Switzerland (21 articles) and Education Sciences (17 articles) gain the highest number of published articles. The ranking of these two journals is aligned with the research results from Wang and He (2022). In the research field of digital literacy, most publications were published in interdisciplinary journals. However, a salient trend of research focus is transforming from the information technology and computer science aspect to the educational technology one. Still, journals related to library and information education have contributed a certain number of publications.

Figure 3. Top 15 most productive journals.

Regarding the citations of 235 journals, 19 journals are selected based on the standard of a minimum of 3 documents and a minimum of 20 citations. As Table 2 and Figure 4 illustrate, the journal ‘Sustainability’ ranks top with 21 articles and a total of 449 citations, where the citation of a journal equals the article published in the journal. Among all the 16 articles within this journal, the article ‘Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the life of higher education students: A global perspective’, which was published in 2020, is cited by 640 articles and contributed most to the citation score. This large-scale and cross-sectional study performed timely research on the student’s perceptions of the impact of a pandemic on various parts of their lives. This study revealed that the lack of computer skills exerts difficulties while facing the transition to a new learning environment (Aristovnik et al., 2020). Other high-cited articles concern the digital competence of educators and the technological integration with other unconventional teaching approaches, such as blended learning and flipped classrooms (Collado-Valero et al., 2021; Sánchez Ruiz et al., 2021). The journal ‘Frontiers in Psychology’ comes in second on the ranking with only 8 articles but attaining 343 citations. The article that contributed most to the citation score is a study by Gao and Zhang (2020), who discussed the cognitions of Chinese foreign language teachers towards online teaching through the qualitative method. According to this study, university teachers perceived relatively clear cognition of online education and attained ICT literacy by teaching, student needs and the transition from traditional teaching methods to online teaching (Gao & Zhang, 2020). The third highest citation of the journal ‘Education Sciences’, which published 17 articles and yielded 323 citations. In this journal, the research of Almazova et al. (2020) mainly discussed the challenge and experience of online education from the perspective of Russian teachers by applying multiple research methods. The research found that the readiness of educators and students, the electronic education environment and support from the university are the most crucial impact factors in the implementation of online teaching and the computer literacy level of teachers also needs to be paid attention to Almazova et al. (2020).

Figure 4. Visualization of most cited journals.

Table 2. The ranking of most citation journals.

Ranking	Source	Documents	Citations
1	Sustainability	21	449
2	Frontiers in Psychology	8	343
3	Education Sciences	17	323
4	Education and Information Technologies	10	143
5	Journal of Academic Librarianship	6	132
6	British Journal of Educational Technology	5	103
7	Frontiers in Education	13	96
8	Journal of University Teaching and Learning	8	57
9	International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education	3	51
10	Educational Technology Research and Development	6	47
11	Journal of Computer Assisted Learning	3	44
12	European Journal of Contemporary Education	3	39
13	International Journal of Learning, Teaching, and Educational Research	4	34
14	Pixel-bit, revista de modios y Educacion	3	28
15	2021 9th International Conference on Information and Education Technology	3	26
16	Digital Library Perspectives	3	25
17	International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning	6	22
18	Asian Association of Open Universities Journal	3	20

Generally, the more articles published by a journal, the higher the citation is. However, there are some exceptions, such as the journals ‘Education in the Knowledge Society’, ‘Computers and Education’ and ‘Computers in Human Behaviour’ which only published one article during the research period, but all produced over 50 citations. These three articles were all published in 2021. One is a literature review on the topic of digital competence in higher education. Researchers of this study discussed several aspects of digital competence over 6 years and tried to depict a comprehensive picture in the context of higher education of how it gains more citations (Zhao et al., 2021). The other article from Peñalvo (2021) explored the implication of digital transformation on universities brought about by COVID-19 pandemic. He argued that digital transformation strategies are insufficient which is evident at universities, thus the maturity of digital transformation is also affected not only by the technology development but also by the digital competence of people who are involved in the process (Peñalvo, 2021). The other article in the journal ‘Computers in Human Behavior’ addressed the issue of how university teachers’ agency is and how they react to emergency online teaching under the digital context of COVID-19 pandemic. Their study mentioned the development of digital competence should be mutually concerned by both universities and teachers to deal with future abrupt crises that affect education (Damşa et al., 2021). Although the above three articles studied different topics, they all explored the challenges caused by the pandemic in the higher education sector and their fast response towards the issue of digital transformation of education attracted more citations for them.

Co-citation analysis

Figure 5 presents the co-citation network visualisation based on the bibliographic data through the analysis of cited sources. The network is produced by counting the link between two articles cited by the same document, and the relatedness of journals is represented by the co-citation link, displayed distance and the line connected with them (van Eck & Waltman, 2010). In this figure, a total of 14 sources were selected based on the standard of a minimum of 50 citation numbers. There are three clusters, and some citation patterns are shared with the most-cited journal analysis. For example, ‘Sustainability’ shows the strongest link strength and connection with 13 journals as the most highly cited journal. However, the relatedness with journals from other clusters is less close than in the blue cluster. The second and the third largest clusters are formed by ‘Computer and Education’ and ‘Education and Information Technology’. Although the publication number is lower, the average citation per article is higher. Conversely, journals with high citations, such as ‘Frontiers in Psychology’, ‘Education Sciences’ and ‘Journal of Academic Librarianship’, do not display strong link strength. The green cluster of journals can be observed as closely related to educational technology and exhibits a strong relatedness among similar journals. Generally, three clusters form a relatively connected network together. However, clusters green and red focus on the area of education and technology presenting a closer co-citation relation than the blue cluster.

Figure 5. Network visualization of co-citation journals.

In summary, there is little similarity but more differences among the results of co-cited journals. It can be observed that only three journals reappeared in the network of co-cited journals, which indicates these journals have more impact on citation and the topic of digital literacy in education. Both networks have strong correlations. However, since the pandemic was a sudden stimulus, journals in various fields have drawn substantial attention to it leading to weak or no connections among those with relatively high citation numbers in the co-cited network.

As illustrated in Figure 6 of subject area categories, the field of computer science contributed the most publications ranking at the top with 158 articles (32.9%). Engineering comes in second with 61 publications (12.7%) and psychology comes in third with 46 publications (9.6%) on the list. Among the top 10 subject areas, economics, econometrics, and finance rank at the bottom with only 13 articles (2.7%) published. Compared to the study of Wang and He (2022), the publication in the subject area of arts and humanities decreased, however, both engineering and psychology increased. Thus, computer science remains the most prolific subject area in the research of digital literacy, which is consistent with previous studies (Stopar & Bartol, 2019; Wang & He, 2022). Due to the less detailed classification of Scopus, sometimes an article can be categorised into multiple areas. The actual top ranking of the subject area is social science which accounts for 434 articles, then followed by computer science. To avoid confusion, the present study did not include the data of social science in the percentage calculation.

Figure 6. Publications in different subject areas.

Co-word analysis

The method of co-word analysis has been applied to investigate the research hot topics and trends in many fields. It is a method that shows clusters of key concepts or words that frequently appear together in articles, and that also displays a strong correlation among them (Chen et al., 2016; Stopar & Bartol, 2019). As Figure 7 shows the result of co-occurrence keywords from the collected data, a visualized map of the network is attained by using the VOSviewer. Before generating the final result, the data was cleaned to avoid the repetition of similar concepts for a more concentrated result. For example, ‘pandemic/pandemics, coronavirus’ are replaced by ‘COVID-19’. The analysis unit is based on all keywords including author keywords and index keywords. In the meantime, the standard occurrence of a keyword is set to five as the minimum number. It can be observed from the map that there are five salient clusters of ‘e-learning and teachers’ in yellow, ‘digital transformation and digital education’ in purple, ‘online teaching and digital skills’ in purple, ‘higher education, digital competencies and digital literacies’ in green, ‘information literacy, online learning and COVID-19’ in red, and ‘students and distance education’ in blue. Regarding the frequency of keywords, the most frequently occurring words are ‘COVID-19 (207 occurrences), higher education (128 occurrences), e-learning (81 occurrences), students (75 occurrences), digital literacies (66 occurrences), and online learning (70 occurrences)’. In addition, other commonly occurring keywords are ‘digital competencies (65 occurrences), information literacy (40 occurrences), digital skills (39 occurrences), distance education (42 occurrences), teaching (33 occurrences)’. The blue cluster mainly explores the students’ attitudes, perceptions, satisfaction, experiences and learning outcomes over e-learning when experiencing the pandemic. The green cluster primarily focuses on the digital literacy and technology challenge brought by COVID-19 to learners and educators. The yellow cluster mainly explores the digital competence of student-teachers and university faculty in the time of the pandemic. The red cluster mainly discusses the different forms of online learning and teaching, and the digital divide in university education. There is one small cluster, the purple one, investigating the issue of the digital transformation in education that was boosted by the pandemic.

Figure 7. Clusters and network visualization of co-occurrence words.

In general, the occurrence of keywords is interlapping and associating with each other. The predominant focus of research in higher education is threefold. The first is the digital competence and skills of students and educators; the second is the adaption and experiences of online education including the psychological aspects, such as perception, satisfaction, and attitude; the third is the integration of digital technologies into online education. In addition, there are a few studies concerning the obstacles and challenges of the education sector while turning to online education especially when facing abrupt circumstances. According to the keyword analysis, research about digital competence or technology-related concepts will still be popular topics in the education sector in the post-pandemic era. The aftermath of COVID-19 provoked substantial influence on the forms of education and largely affected the teaching paradigm.

Discussion

This study analysed a total of 479 publications related to the topic of digital literacy in the higher education sector during the pandemic period. Through applying the bibliometric method, a general and holistic overview can be attained, as well as identifying the rising trend in the field of digital literacy and higher education. Considering the results of the keyword co-occurrence analysis and citation analysis, the following research themes that were commonly studied can be summarized.

Impact and challenge

The pandemic as the crucial factor, propels the development of education at an unprecedented pace. Therefore, several studies explored the impact, challenge, technological transformation, barriers and obstacles, and opportunities associated with digital literacy that has faced since online education became a new normal during the pandemic period (Akour & Alenezi, 2022; Almazova et al., 2020; Aristovnik et al., 2020; Núñez-Canal et al., 2022; Peñalvo, 2021; Rahiem, 2020; Tejedor et al., 2020). As Akour and Alenezi (2022) stated in their study, in what is known as ‘flipped classrooms’, lecturers take on the role of facilitators making higher education more inquiry-based and student-centred, which also emphasises the research trend should focus more on learning theory, didactics, and digital education technology. According to the study on students’ experience and satisfaction (Rahman, 2021), the internet, electricity, data price, digital devices, learning environment, technical and pedagogic skills of teachers, and student engagement are the main challenges that online teaching is facing. This study further supports the research of Rahiem (2020) early in the pandemic, which also discovered the barriers and challenges of using ICT by students. A study from Alomyan (2021) responds to the psychological impact of distance learning, and students in their early stage of study or those with weak computer skills reported the highest negative impact on learning.

Perception

Another significant portion of the articles concentrates on the perception of digital competence either from the faculty aspect or student perspectives while facing emergency remote education. For example, in the study of Portillo et al. (2020), educators from every educational stage all perceive a shortage of digital skills which results from their workload increase, and the lower digital competence at the lower level of education, the more difficult to perform remote teaching. Some educators also maintain the perspective that students are not capable of applying digital competence in critical usage, evaluation and communicating information, thus educators are not confident in cultivating students of in those competencies due to job insecurity and the conventional way of teaching. In a cross-sectional study on the students’ perception, Eri et al. (2021) investigated the students’ digital resilience towards the pandemic through the perspective of analysing digital competencies before and after the COVID-19. This study also confirmed that students’ digital literacy and technological usage would help them retain academic achievement during the pandemic.

From the satisfaction aspect, some researchers discovered that students who lack digital skills may perceive a negative perception towards remote learning, which would also impact their satisfaction (Zouiri & Kinani, 2022). The study of Al‐Taweel et al. (2021) also revealed that senior dental students with higher computer skills and technology-based learning showed higher levels of satisfaction and attitude. This result also aligned with the research from Kovačević et al. (2021), Younas et al. (2022), and Batez (2021), who stated that there is a positive correlation between students’ satisfaction and their level of digital competency when concerning online education. Regarding teachers’ satisfaction, Li and Yu (2022) argued that teachers’ satisfaction decreased due to the increase in workload particularly during the pandemic, and there is a significant correlation between teachers’ digital literacy level, career satisfaction and teaching role. Even though educators mostly maintain positive attitudes towards the usage of digital tools, there is still an increase in anxiety and extra workload in regard to the lack of digital competency (Karasneh et al., 2021; Rangel-Pérez et al., 2021).

Digital competence and technology integration

Some studies investigated the digital competency of educators and students in various subject areas, attempting to identify the association and issues between both parties. For example, in the study of Núñez-Canal et al. (2022), through analysing the digital competence of educators, their findings highlight the importance of an educator’s previous experience in technology, training and attitude towards technology in relation to students’ learning process. According to the study by Frolova et al. (2021), due to the incapability of retaining a required level of self-organization, students did not perform actively as a participant during online education, which leads to a higher demand for teachers’ digital competency and personality. In another study, researchers employed an empirical study on teachers’ digital competence by investigating the impact factors of gender and teaching experience (Zhao et al., 2021). Another empirical study explored the digital competence of students and claimed that universities do not pay adequate attention to developing students’ digital citizen skills and mindsets (Martzoukou et al., 2022). Vodă et al. (2022) compared the digital competence of students from different subject areas, and the results showed that students majoring in humanities are more inclined to acquire creativity and information of digital skills. Whereas students in economic and social sciences majors present stronger ability of communication, critical thinking, and technical digital skills. Thus, the level of students’ digital competence is closely associated with their academic performance (Peñalvo, 2021).

Concerning the integration of technology that facilitates learning and teaching, some researchers’ studies explored this issue through a micro-lensed perspective, such as the usage of mobile phone applications, and interactive software (Jeong, 2022; Pichardo et al., 2021). Some other research explores the integration of teaching methodologies and digital technologies, such as blended learning, flipped classrooms and digital technologies, in the form of practical case studies. For example, the research of Sánchez Ruiz et al. (2021) found that Engineering students who experienced blended learning and used digital technologies prior to the pandemic not only expressed robust resilience but also changed their way of learning, and habits as well as improved digital skills when they faced the transition to online education. All in all, the integration of digital technology into the curriculum and pedagogy of higher education should be continued with the improvement of digital literacy among students (Farsawang & Songkram, 2023).

Assessment and effectiveness

Concerning the topic of evaluation and assessment, some studies explored the effectiveness of digital literacy, digital technology and various educational approaches applied to online and distance education.

The study of Zou et al. (2021) provided the perspective of EFL teacher engagement and influence factors on online formative assessment. The results revealed that engagements were largely shaped by beliefs, digital literacies and teaching experiences of the teachers, and were further affected by pertinent contextual and technological factors. It followed the research of Joshi et al. (2021), which argued that there were four main barriers, such as home environment, institutional support, technical difficulties and personal problems, and challenging online teaching and assessment. Particularly, the lack of technological application and integration hindered the engagement in teaching and assessment online. From the students’ perspective on assessment online, a high level of acceptance was reported in a study, but it varied in relation to students from different disciplines and their computer skills (Alsalhi et al., 2022). From the testing aspect, the study of Alkamel et al. (2021) showed that students did not experience particular difficulties and expressed positive attitudes when facing the transition from the traditional form of testing to online testing, yet the ICT skills of students can be improved to some extent.

Digital divide, gap and inclusion

Regarding this theme, many studies addressed digital inequity which may be due to various factors, such as economic status, gender, network infrastructure, and personal digital literacy, and has been amplified by the pandemic (Antee, 2021; Chen et al., 2022; Gan & Sun, 2021; Rafiq et al., 2021; Ulzheimer et al., 2021; Yaqin et al., 2023).

Regarding the digital divide, researchers from South Africa discovered students encountered the ‘online learning divide’ not only due to technological and digital inequity but also by attending ‘marginalised universities’(Azionya & Nhedzi, 2021). From the study of Antee (2021), the findings indicate that students with inadequate digital literacy skills and access are particularly in relation to their underprivileged economic status. This research result is also consistent with the study of Gocotano et al. (2021), which claims that students from rural areas may be facing more challenges and difficulties in regard to online learning. Also, Gan and Sun (2021)agreed that digital barriers (slow internet, technical problems, lack of computer resources, lack of internet access, skill deficiency) would be varied by students’ social and economic backgrounds. They suggested that the theory of capital can be an approach to be applied for further exploring the digital divide and digital inclusion in online education. Some studies discussed digital literacy and online education related to the gender aspect (Apriani et al., 2022). In addition, many studies discovered and further proved the difference and correlation in digital competence within gender (Cabero‐Almenara et al., 2022; Portillo et al., 2020). In the end, many studies also recommended suggestions to educators and policymakers on how to tackle the digital divide, such as raising awareness, increasing investment, improving pedagogy, employing various learning modes, enhancing educational policies, and integrating with the curriculum (Azionya & Nhedzi, 2021; Gan & Sun, 2021; Gocotano et al., 2021; Samane-Cutipa et al., 2022).

Conclusion

Digital literacy has been a popular research area in the context of higher education. With the boost of the pandemic and city lockdown, the technology development needed to be accelerated to adapt to the emergency situation. Therefore, topics about the relationship between technology and education were substantially discussed. From the results of the present study, the total publication output did not experience an abrupt growth during the research period. The annual publication from the year of 2021 to 2023 does not present an upward trend with 164, 155 and 133 respectively. However, clear attention to educational technology and digital literacy will remain a critical issue in education after the pandemic. From the analysis of the most prolific authors and journals, digital competence and digital skills of teaching staff and students are the major issues being mostly discussed. Besides, digital barriers, such as technology resources and internet access are explored more in this area.

The research trend of digital literacy can be estimated from clusters suggesting that future research may continue to focus on online education (e-learning, online learning, online teaching, distance learning), digital literacies and competence, pedagogy, learning process and teaching strategies. In addition, there exist a proportion of articles related to the digital divide. Many developing countries or regions still lack the accessibility to the internet or digital devices which exacerbates the unavailability of education (Azionya & Nhedzi, 2021; Portillo et al., 2020; Rafiq et al., 2021; Rahiem, 2020). Therefore, the issue of digital equity is gaining more attention which may be an important research direction in digital literacy.

Overall, there are some limitations of this study. Firstly, the data used in this study is restricted to the Scopus database and only the publications indexed in Scopus are included. The inferences are based on the articles that are gaining more citations in the collected data. Secondly, the terms applied for retrieving articles might be limited to diversity and may lead to the exclusion of some articles. However, a wide variation of the keywords may also produce search noise to the accuracy of data searching. To increase the coverage of the data, the search query of Stopar and Bartol (2019) was employed, which not only the terms in this query were more frequently used by other researchers, but also covered a comprehensive range of key concepts in this area. Similarly, the range of data retrieval is limited to a four-year period that generates a small number of results. In response to an emergent situation, academia needs a period of time to investigate relevant educational issues that happened during the pandemic time.

Entering the post-pandemic era, education at the tertiary level will never be the same as before. This study seeks to explore the future trend of digital literacy research in the higher education sector by discovering certain publication and citation patterns. Even though the distribution of publications shows a scattered pattern with multiple themes in clusters. The analysis of this study still can shed some light on future studies related to digital literacy, for example, reflection on barriers and challenges in higher education. More case studies will focus on the impact of emergent online education on students’ learning and teachers’ teaching from pedagogical perspectives. In addition, the quality and effectiveness of remote teaching and learning by using digital technologies will also be a focus of future research. Although some themes, for example, the digital literacy gap, divide and equity, received fewer citations than research on the conception, application, and competence of digital literacy, these are the key research issues that would attract proactive discussion in forthcoming studies. In conclusion, this study aims to enlighten the research direction and provide inspiration for future research in the field of digital literacy.

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Yong Tan

Yong Tan holds a Master of Arts degree in literature studies and was a previous lecturer teaching English major students at universities in China. He is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. His main research interests focus on educational technologies in language teaching and learning, EFL teaching and learning, higher education studies, and digital literacies.