Information literacy in the professional literature: an exploratory analysis

Purpose – The current study aims to review the different publications dealing with information literacy and the emerging trends reflected over the ten years, 1999‐2009, in the Web of Science (WOS) database. Design/methodology/approach – The study presents both a statistical descriptive analysis of document type, subject areas, authors, source titles, publication years, languages, countries and keywords of publications extracted from the WOS database, as well as a thorough content analysis of keywords and abstracts extracted from the WOS database. Findings – The main results suggest that the term information literacy has various characteristics in an additional and interesting context: health and medicine. This finding may reflect a tendency of association between information literacy and health and medicine and stresses people's need for information literacy in this specific context. Originality/value – The current study emphasises the notion that information literacy is no longer an issue for librarians or educators only.