Abstract
PurposeThe health literacy concerned by numerous policy and advocacy organizations is springing up rapidly and has evolved substantially over the past few decades. During the period of COVID-19, people who are in the absence of effective treatment and limited availability of vaccination need a higher health literacy to protective themselves. In order to provide a summary of the health literacy research, a visualized and Scientometric analysis is applied in this study.MethodsBased on a scientific review of 3,670 data on health literacy from Web of Science, this research uses Citespace software to systematically and objectively describe health literacy to determine the knowledge evolution structure between articles and investigate research trends.ResultsThe results show that the annual outputs of publications have grown rapidly since 2003. The USA and Australia make larger contributions compared with other countries in terms of quantity of publications and worldwide collaboration relationship between them. The “Soc Sci Med,” “J Health Commun.” “Patient Educ Couns” and “J Gen Intern Med” pay more attention to health literacy research. The leading authors with influence and authority are Wolf MS, Osborne RH, and Paasche-Orlow MK. Health literacy research in this field focuses on care, knowledge, and education, and so on. An emerging trend of health literacy with Covid-19, online tools, nursing, and obesity will spread across the globe.ConclusionCompared with simply reviewing existing articles, the major contribution in this study is a comprehensive review of yearly scientific output, journals, countries, institutions, contributors, highly cited papers, and keywords for health literacy research. The review also provides valuable and seminal guidelines for interested researchers on health literacy research.
Highlights
Along with changing demographics, significant advancement in science and technology, improvement of individuals’ health beliefs as well as the complex demands of health in modern society, individuals and counties pay more attention to the health knowledge and skill to maintain or improve quality of life
A rapid upward growth pattern of published articles on health literacy after 2003 can be explained by the publicities undertaken by the Institute of Medicine, the American Medical Association, and the Medical Library Association (MLA) around this time [30, 31]
Citespace has an advantage on the academic search of the Web of Science (WOS) core or other databases compare with Bibliometrix, Sci2, SciMAT, SATI, and Bibexcel
Summary
Significant advancement in science and technology, improvement of individuals’ health beliefs as well as the complex demands of health in modern society, individuals and counties pay more attention to the health knowledge and skill to maintain or improve quality of life. There are still challenges with low health literacy to embed health literacy principles into effective self-management of diseases. On these grounds, health literacy is a crucial factor associated with health care and has greatly attracted scholars’ interest. Health literacy is the skill or ability to retrieve, understand, analyze and act on this information as defined by the American Medical Association Foundation [7]. Based on the above definitions, several relevant studies on health literacy from different disciplines have been carried out to enhance their ability to recognize disorders and seek effective treatments [6, 9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]
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