GLOBAL RESEARCH PROGRESS ON HEALTH LITERACY: AN ANALYSIS

Abstract

Health literacy is basic set of skills that required by the mankind to understand and use the information in such a way, which promote and maintain good health. The main objective of the study is to confess the evolving pattern of scholarly communication on health literacy and also identify the core journals, prolific authors and productive countries. The data was collected from the Scopus databases using keywords and analysis was carried out using the Microsoft Excel. The Literature on HL has increased exponentially involving more numbers of authors. A sum of 68,740 pages of peer-reviewed literature was generated in last 15 years. Recent times almost more than 30% of the articles were open access. The journals namely: Patient education and counselling, Journal of health communication and BMC public health have published considerable number of articles on HL. As per the Y index “Furnham, A.” from University College London, UK was the productive author. The USA was the leader in HL research.The study indicates the research activities on health literacy have increased in many folds and developing countries representation in health literacy research very less, countries like the USA, UK and Australia should extend the assistance to authors from the developing countries.