A bibliometric analysis of academic literacy: a review of the state of the art, from the past to the future

Abstract

Purpose: The current discourse on productivity research in academic literacy has increased in the last quinquennium. This research aims to illustrate the application of academic literacy in various fields of study that include educational research and linguistics and show its evolution in literary production. Design/methodology/approach: Web of Sciences (WoS), one of the databases of citations and summaries of different kinds of literary productions, was used for this bibliometric analysis to collect data recorded since the first document on academic literacy appeared in 1989 until mid-2020. The results downloaded were analyzed using specific parameters. Excel was used to analyze the recovered data and VOSviewer to visualize the network map distribution of academic citation by country, bibliographic coupling by source, co-citation by cited authors and co-citation by cited references. The descriptive bibliometric approach allows for tracking intellectual outputs and describing or evaluating their nature and evolution. Findings: WoS records dissimilar types of documents, such as articles, book reviews, editorial materials, corrections, meeting abstracts, notes, etc. There were 866 publications, which received 8,767 citations, Teaching in Higher Education published the most articles (34), followed by Journal of English for Academic Purposes (28) and Journal of Academic Language and Learning (26). The term "Academic Literacy" appears most commonly as the author keyword. Originality/value: The study is the first bibliometric analysis about academic literacy to highlights how it has evolved over the last 31 years. This bibliometric analysis confirms a remarkable growth of academic literacy in research publications and scientometric performance that differ from education research and linguistics.

Key words: academic literacy, academic alphabetization, academic writing, bibliometric analysis, WoS.