Information literacy (IL) is the ability to effectively access and efficiently evaluate information to fulfill the given information need. It comprises of cluster of competencies like research strategy, evaluation and knowledge of tools and resources (Behrens, 1994; Rader, 1991). Lenox and Walker (1993) characterized the information literate person with analytical and critical skills to formulate research questions and evaluate results and endorsed with the skills to search for and access a variety of information types in order to realize their information requirements. Zurkowski was the first to use the concept of IL in 1974 and since then the field has received a vast amount of attention from both practical and research perspectives. As the IL has the potential to transform lives and societies, its importance is appreciated globally (Rader, 2002; Zurkowski, 1974). IL is a multifaceted dimensional concept, and as such its scope range from everyday life to education and workplace settings and it covers all age groups ranging from infants to the elderly. Thus, one can conclude that IL is common to all disciplines, to all learning environments, and to all levels of education. IL certainly forms the basis for lifelong learning in present information society scenario (Pinto, Fernandez-Pascual,et al., 2019). Various new literacies have been included for IL after 2000. These include terms like lifelong literacy, self-directed learning, visual literacy, digital literacy, media literacy, health literacy, business information literacy, meta-literacy, content literacy, workplace information literacy, scientific literacy and science literacy. IL helps the learners to acquire skills which help them to become self-sufficient and have greater control over their self-learning. Thus, learners become independent, critical thinkers and life-long learner (Swapna & Biradar, 2017). Lloyd and Williamson (2008) expressed the IL as a core literacy of the information society in 21st century to achieve educational, occupational, economic and personal goals in the knowledge society. IL is vital for every profession that covers students, teachers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, judges, politicians, scientists, administrative officers, school children, businessman, industrial workers, and common citizens to perform their duties in more productive way. Thus, importance of delivering IL knowledge in current learning environments have been highlighted by many studies (Onyancha, 2020; Maybee & Flierl, 2016; Schachter, 2020; Walsh, 2009; Mulla, 2014; Parvathamma & Pattar, 2013; Sevukan & Gomathy, 2015; Shoeb, 2011; Ubogu, 2011; Wang, 2011).

The word bibliometrics has been derived from the Latin and Greek words “biblio” and “metrics”, which denotes the application of mathematics to the study of bibliography. This term was coined by Alan Pritchard and defined it as “application of mathematical and statistical methods to the entire scientific literature, books and other materials” (Pritchard, 1969). Since then, various definitions of bibliometrics has been put forward by various authors from time to time though application of mathematical and statistical methods have been the core of each of them (Durieux & Gevenois, 2010; Sengupta, 1985). Bibliometric analysis serves as a useful tool in assessing the quality and promoting scientific productivity (McBurney & Novak, 2002; Thanuskodi, 2010). In the current era, bibliometric studies are increasingly being used for the research assessment to identify the pattern of publication, publishing country, authorship, citations, journal coverage and other related items (Singh,et al., 2007; Maharana, 2013; Zhu & Willet, 2011). For this purpose, several indicators are used that are broadly classified into three groups:

Quantity indicators: It measures the productivity of a particular researcher.

Quality indicators: It measure the quality (or “performance”) of a researcher’s output; and

Structural indicators: It measures connections between publications, authors and areas of research (Durieux & Gevenois, 2010).

With advent of different social online platforms that have been extensively used by researchers for scholarly communication, an alternative metrics – Altmetrics came into use that is determined by the count of article views, saves, downloads, cites, mentions etc. in social media (Poplasen & Zrnic, 2014), with a main aim of measuring the scholar interaction from the online social media tools which are used to share the research out-put (like bookmarking, blog post, twitter, facebook post, etc.) (Jabur, 2016). Usually, the altmetrics score assigned to a particular attention indicator, which the research output has gained on different sites, is given as a weighted count in order to reflect the relative reach of each type of site or source (How is the altmetric, 2019). Since, Altmetrics measure diverse impacts and accumulate faster than citations; it is usually regarded as being complementary to citations. According to Priem, et al., (2012, p. 3) “citation and Altmetrics indicators track related but distinct impacts, with neither able to describe the complete picture of scholarly use alone.” Therefore, comparing the altmetric scores of publications with the citation counts would help to gauge the degree of association between the two.

This study is an attempt to study the literature published on IL and it is different from previous studies in objectives, period covered, and approach adopted. The study also examines the correlation between altmetrics and citation count of these articles.

Over the period, numerous bibliometric analysis studies have been carried out by researchers. Only a few relevant past bibliometric studies have been reviewed in this article pertaining to the IL. Uribe-Tirado and Alhuay Quispe (2017) in their study found three trends in international bibliometric studies pertaining to IL that are published in the past decade. These can be distinguished into:

Studies on general production (like countries, authors and journals),

Studies focused on subject areas, and Specific studies on a particular publication or context.

Various scholars have performed the bibliometric studies regarding general production that identify the highest publishing countries, the most contributing and highly cited authors, the most commonly used keywords, funding organizations and similar items (Aharony, 2010; Bhardwaj, 2017; Hsiehet al., 2013; Kolle, 2017; Majidet al., 2015; Mulla, 2012; Sproleset al., 2013; Taskinet al., 2013; Park & Kim, 2011).

The metric studies concerning the subject area have also been conducted that observed the production in recent years of IL in different subject areas. The major topics are assessment, information competencies, e-learning, libraries, and research (Alagu & Thanuskodi, 2018; Pintoet al., 2019, Pinto,et al., 2013; Urs,et al., 2013; Pinto 2015).

The trend of specific studies on a particular publication or context has also received attention. Numerous scholars examined specific journals to have insight about the authorship pattern, citations received per article, types of articles published (research or review based), etc. (Lipetz, 1999; Tiew, Abdullah & Kaur, 2002; Bakri & Willett, 2008). Panda et al., (2013) analyzed the Journal of Information Literacy from 2007 to 2012. They observed that the maximum articles published were single authored and highest contribution were from United Kingdom. Tallolli and Mulla (2016) also examined the same journal for time period 2011-2015 and thus acted as update of the previous study. They found that during this period about 155 papers has been published by 220 authors which oftenly belonged from USA, United Kingdom and Canada.

The studies evaluating the relationship between altmetrics and traditionally used bibliometrics for the IL literature is very less. But recently Uribe-Tirado and Alhuay Quispe (2017) performed similar type of research work and tried to analyze the impact and subsequent use of scholarly works about IL on social and scientific platforms using different bibliometric and altmetric indicators. They observed that there is a positive two-way impact from bibliometric to altmetric, in terms of both the productivity and the impact-visibility center on specific authors writing about IL.

Several indicators have been used to evaluate research for the past many decades. The traditional indicators gauge the research based on citations and other bibliometric whereas Altmetrics analyze the attention, use and dissemination of scientific articles from online social platforms.

Therefore, the current study aims to study the literature indexed on IL in WoS database and use the various bibliometric measures to analyze the specific aspects of publishing trends. The study also gauges the association between Altmetrics with citation score of the corresponding publications.

The scope of this study was limited to the literature on IL in WoS database. Further, the study was limited to WoS category – information science library science, document type – journal articles and published in English language only.

The objectives of the study are:

To measure the nation wise contribution on IL.

To determine the type of publications.

To analyze the distribution of citations during different periods.

To analyze the authorship pattern.

To analyze the top keywords used.

To find out the 20 topmost cited articles with their characteristics.

To gauge the relation between Altmetrics and citation count of the selected articles.

Thus, study attempts to bring forth the quantitative growth of IL publications through various bibliometric indicators.

The descriptive research methodology was employed for the study. For the collection of data for the current study official websites of WoS database (webofscience.com) were browsed and explored on 10-12-2023 and the relevant data on IL was harvested. The overall data collection comprised the following steps:

The official website of WoS was explored and total of 13 keywords were inserted under title in the advanced search box with “or” Boolean operator inserted between them. The keywords used include information literacy, digital literacy, media literacy, health literacy, business information literacy, meta-literacy, content literacy, workplace information literacy, scientific literacy, science literacy, lifelong literacy, self-directed learning and visual literacy. As of 10-6-2022, a total of 11,094 publications were found. These were further limited by document type – article, WoS categories – information science library science and language – English, that restricted the count to 1,155. From among these, all bibliometric data of each article is selected for the explorations were probed individually.

The bibliometric data of each article was extracted from WoS database and the file was downloaded. Further, DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of each article was identified. DOI of top 100 highly cited articles were browsed to extract the altmetrics attention score of each article from official website of Altmetrics (altmetrics.com).

Finally, the collected data was tabulated, analyzed and interpreted in accordance with the objectives set with the help of Excel, VOSViewer, R and SPSS software tools. Further, Spearman’s rho was calculated for determining the association between the altmetrics score with citation count which is a non-parametric test that is used to measure the degree of association between two variables. The Spearman rank correlation test does not carry any assumptions about the distribution of the data and is the appropriate correlation analysis when the variables are measured on a scale that is at least ordinal. Spearman’s correlation determines the strength and direction of the monotonic relationship between two variables (Laerd statistics, 2018). The following formula is used to calculate the Spearman rank correlation:

Usually, Spearman instead of Pearson correlation is used because metrics data is typically too skewed for the assumption of normal distribution of a Pearson test and has too many zero values to be transformed into a normal distribution (Li,et al., 2012; Sud & Thelwall, 2014).

A total of 1,155 articles were selected for the study about IL and these were published in 28 different countries. Most publications belonged to USA (61.40%) followed by UK (4.88%). Australia (4.42%) and Spain (4.42%) have the same contribution followed by Canada (3.26%) and China (3.02%). It is evident from the data that USA is at par in publishing literature on IL in comparison to all other contributing nations. Table 1 presents a detailed view of all contributing nations.

Most documents published on IL are in the form of articles (93.18%) while few are in form of conference proceeding papers (4.46%) and scarce amount of early access papers (1.93%) were also present. Table 2 provides detailed view.

The data included the articles of 33 years from 1989-2022 and it was observed that the articles of year 2016 (106) received highest number of citations followed by year 2011 (91) and 2015 (77). But mean total citations per article is highest for year 1997 (70.5) and 2000 (67.75) while mean total citations per year is highest for year 2012 (3.65) and 2010 (3.61). The detailed view picture is provided in Table 3.

There were a total of 2340 authors that contributed to 1,155 papers under study. Among these majority of authors (87.77%) engaged in a collaborative manner for publishing their work while only 12.22% of authors have solo author publications. Further, the majority (68.79%) of multi author publications was traced during the study and the single author’s contributions were found to be 31.2%. It depicts that article publication trend in IL is towards the multi author’s approach. Further, the collaboration index 2.51 has been calculated for the publications under study (Table 4).

A collaboration index is introduced to measure the level of collaborative practices. The Collaboration Index (CI) is counted by the formula which is suggested by the Lawani (1980) as:

Where, j=The number authors in an article i.e. 1, 2, 3 ……

fj=The number of j authored articles,

N=The total number of articles published in a year, and

A=The total number of authors per articles,

The greater the collaborative index of a set of papers, the higher its proportion of quality papers is.

The study found that the most highly cited 20 articles belonged mostly (11) to the Journal of Health Communication and are generally multi-authored (15). Five articles were contributed by a single author, five by joint authors, three by three authors, two by four authors, two by five authors, one by six authors and two by seven authors respectively. One article published in 1994, one in 1997, one in 2000, one in 2002, two in 2005, three in 2006, one in 2009, three in 2010, two in 2011, three in 2012, one in 2013, and the remaining one in 2014, respectively. The article entitled “Health Literacy: What Is It?” was the most cited article with 429 citations published in journal of Health Communication during 2010. Berkman, Davis and McCormack have authored the paper, and all three authors belong to the USA. Interestingly, the top three highly cited papers were all published in the Journal of health communication i.e., they belonged to the USA. The article with the highest citation score has also highest total citations per year but it has achieved only 13 altmetric score. The highest altmetric score is achieved by article which has 8^th rank in citation score. It was also noticed that there are few articles (4) that has not attained any social attention and thus have not score any altmetric attention. Table 5 provides detailed picture of data.

The strengths of word association may shed more light on the independence and the rise and development of the new and emerging literacies. The analysis of the keywords chosen by the authors to index the content of their papers is also of great interest. There were 2176 keywords that co-appeared with IL in the literature. Figure 1 provides the keywords mentioned as the author supplied keywords and keyword plus in the IL literature. The most frequent terms in keywords were selected, excluding those whose frequency was less than 5 occurrences, as these are considered as being not relevant to the research. This leads to a decrease in number of keywords to 205. Among these, Information literacy is the most popular term among scholars, and it appeared 313 times. In second position, but far behind in terms of the number is term skills, which appeared 115 times, followed by education (102) and students (85). It indicates that major works are pertaining to assessment of information literacy among students in higher education. Media literacy is the burning issue in the computer science subject since the last decade; it may be due to advancements in information and communication technologies.

Figure 1:
Keyword Occurrence.

The network view is created using the VOS clustering technique, where VOS stands for the visualization of similarities (Van Eck & Waltman, 2010). VOSViewer software provides distance-based maps and identifies the clusters of co-occurring words, which allows us to identify the main terms and the relationships between those terms. We have considered the “total link strength attribute”, which indicates the total strength of the links of an item with other items. Colors indicate the cluster to which a term was assigned. To facilitate interpretation, the links in the keywords network are displayed using curved lines (Figure 1).

Cluster 1: It consists of 69 items depicted by red color. Most occurring words among them are knowledge, outcomes, care, impact, information, communication and internet.

Cluster 2: It consists of 38 items depicted by green color. Most occurring words among them are information literacy, education, academic libraries, librarians, higher education, health literacy and libraries.

Cluster 3: It consists of 31 items depicted by blue color. Most occurring words among them are skills, students, instruction, perceptions, university, curriculum and faculty.

Cluster 4: It consists of 27 items depicted by yellow color. Most occurring words among them are library, seeking, behavior, web, attitudes, science and seeking behavior.

Cluster 5: It consists of 23 items depicted by purple color. Most occurring words among them are self-efficacy, model, digital literacy, framework, model, performance and management.

Cluster 6: It consists of 17 items depicted by brown color. Most occurring words among them are library instruction, online, motivation, trends, e-learning, pedagogy and critical thinking.

An analysis of top 100 highly cited papers indicated that only 5 of them do not possessed DOI and about 64% (95) of the DOI manuscripts, had at least one altmetric activity. Using Spearman’s rho, it was also evidenced that there is a low positive correlation between the number of citations received and altmetric score of top highly cited papers (r_s=0.248) as depicted in Table 6. Uribe-Tirado and Alhuay Quispe (2017) in their study also observed positive two-way impact from bibliometric to altmetric, in terms of both the productivity and the impact-visibility center on specific authors writing about IL.

But there is need for further investigation in this domain to find direct relationships between different sources and platforms of altmetrics and bibliometrics to get better understanding of their correlations. Alperin (2015); Kuchner (2012); Uribe-Tirado and Alhuay Quispe (2017) proposed that two processes are crucial for gaining online attention which include formation of digital identity by authors or researchers for the creation and management and that the publications must possess DOI.

The study is based on the contributions made in the field of IL, a total of 11,094 articles has been published in the period of 33 years. For the purpose of study, the number was limited to 1,155 articles by restricting the scope through document type, WoS categories and language. The major contribution found during the study was USA (61.40%) and UK (4.88%). These are consistent with findings of Kolle (2017) and Aharony (2010) where they found that most of the documents on IL, were published in the US with UK at second position and other countries very far behind. Other studies also highlighted the same trend of US appear as leading publishing nation on IL (Nazim & Ahmad, 2007; Johnsonet al., 2012; Kondiliset al., 2008, Kumariet al., 2015) also found the same trend of US appear as leading publishing nation. The overall 19.19 average citations per document have been found. It was observed that the articles of year 2016 (106) received highest number of citations but mean total citations per article is highest for year 1997 (70.5) while mean total citations per year is highest for year 2012 (3.65). 93.18% of documents are in the form of articles and 4.46% are available in form of conference proceeding papers during the period. 87.77% of authors engaged in collaborative manners for publishing their work while only 12.22% of authors have solo publications. The collaboration index value is 2.51 that shows that there is encouraging multiple author’s contributions in the field of IL. From the study, the majority of joint authorship and high collaboration index reveals that team research is predominant during the study. These findings consist with previous studies that there is encouraging the multiple author’s contributions in field of IL (Alagu, & Thanuskodi, 2018; Tallolli, & Mulla, 2016). Information literacy is the most popular keyword followed by skills, education and students. This indicates that major works in IL are related to assessment of information literacy among students in higher education which is consistent with findings of Kolle (2017). The study also observed low positive correlation between the number of citations received and altmetric score of top highly cited papers which is supported by previous studies also (Araujo, et al. (2018); Eysenbach, 2011; Rosenkrantzet al., 2017; Uribe-Tirado, & Alhuay Quispe, 2017). Utilizing online social tools by researchers such as ORCID ID, Researcher ID, Research Gate profile, or LinkedIn and link to their profiles on university webpages, CVs, and/or within email signatures can enhance visibility of their publications (Brown, 2016; Schilhanet al., 2021). This will lead to increase in altmetric score progressively.

Special thanks to two anonymous reviewers who are going to spare their time to check the manuscript.