Digital Literacy from 2018-2021: A scientometric study of the literature

Abstract

Digital literacy has been receiving a lot of attention from the academic community. The aim of the study is to examine and analyse the current research status in the areas of digital literacy over the four years from 2018 to 2021. By using the keywords “digital literacy” “digital skills” and “digital competence”, this study retrieved 3057 articles from the Web of Science from 2018 to 2021. These journals are then analyzed using the Web of Science analytical search results service and the VOSviewer application based on scientometric methods. The study finds that there has been a largely upward trend in scholarly research in the field of digital literacy over these four years. Europe and the United States have contributed the most research in this field. Digital literacy is multidisciplinary, there are five main themes in this area of research: digital literacy, digital skills, higher education, education and the digital divide, with several sub-themes under each theme. The findings indicate that there does not seem to be a globally agreed definition of digital literacy and there are limitations to the existing tools for measuring digital literacy in the education field. Hence, future research could be done to determine a more inclusive measure of digital literacy that can be used in different contexts.