The Status of Scholarly Efforts of Librarians in Health Literacy: A Bibliometric Analysis

Objectives: Over the past 20 years, health literacy has increasingly impacted patient care. Recently, Healthy People 2030 updated the definition to include personal health literacy as well as organizational health literacy. As information professionals, librarians can be leaders of helping to improve health literacy through their roles in the classroom, public library, or in the healthcare environment. In order to determine the scholarly impact librarians may have had on health literacy, researchers examined the status and characteristics of health literacy (HL) publications authored by librarians from 2000 to 2019.

Methods: Bibliometrics, the statistical analysis of publications, is used to assess the indicators of productivity, collaboration, and impact or visibility of librarians in health literacy-related research. Data was collected using the multidisciplinary database Scopus and articles were screened for inclusion criteria using Rayyan. Through bibliometrics, quantitative analysis will be performed, including examination of number of citations, number of publications per year and per country, the most prolific authors and their affiliations, most prolific journals and journal impact factors, number of articles published in library science-related and non-library science-related journals, the origin of the first author’s country, number of articles per research type, etc. The itsa (Interrupted Time Series analysis) procedure in Stata was used to assess the trends in publications pre- and post-2013.

Results: Of 321 search results, 219 unique references met the inclusion criteria of librarian authorship. Before 2013, the rate of HL publications increased at a rate of 1.30 annually (95% CI 0.97–1.62, p<0.001). After 2013, the number of HL publications increased at a rate of 4.18 publications (95% CI 3.71–4.65, p<0.001) annually with the peak in 2019 (n=32). Journal of Consumer Health on the Internet was the most prolific journal. The majority of included references were authored by at least two authors with a collaboration index of 2.58. In terms of impact, 79% of included articles were cited at least once.

Conclusions: In the last two decades, librarian involvement in HL publications has exponentially increased, most markedly in the years following 2013. Librarian authors are highly collaborative, but few have published on health literacy multiple times. The visibility, volume, and collaboration efforts show how engaged librarians are in health literacy scholarship. Further research is needed to examine the research and impactful efforts made by librarians that aren’t published.