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.