While Most Information Literacy Research Is Included in the Fields of Library Science and Education, a Considerable Amount Is Found in Medicine and Health

Abstract

A Review of:

Aharony, N. (2010). Information literacy in the professional literature: An exploratory analysis. ASLIB Proceedings: New Information Perspectives, 62(3), 261-282. https://doi.org/10.1108/00012531011046907

Abstract

Objective – To describe the published literature on information literacy from 1999-2009.

Design – Statistical descriptive analysis and content analysis.

Setting – N/A

Subjects – 1,970 publications from the Web of Science database.

Methods – The Web of Science database was searched using the term “information literacy” in the advanced search under “topic,” and was limited to articles published from 1999-2009. Next, information such as document type, subject areas, authors, source titles, publication years, languages, countries, keywords, and abstracts was collected from each document. A statistical descriptive analysis was conducted using the data. A content analysis was performed on the keywords and abstracts from a sampling of the results.

Main Results – Information science/library science and education were the top subject areas of the identified articles, while the third largest subject area was “public, environmental and occupational health.” Nine out of ten journal titles focused on library science, however the journal title containing the second largest number of articles was Patient Education and Counseling. The content analysis revealed that the most common categories for keywords were “miscellaneous,” “health and medicine,” followed by “education.”

Conclusion – The results indicated that information literacy research had been published mainly in journals associated with library science and education; however, a considerable amount of literature was published in health and medicine.