Categories, themes and research evolution of the study of digital literacy: a bibliometric analysis

With the emerging forces of online and digital products, scholars keenly captured digital literacy and have new research dimensions. The purpose of this study is to present a bibliometric analysis of digital literacy using CiteSpace and to explore the categories, themes and research evolution in digital literacy. A total of 9042 bibliographic records were retrieved from the WoS Core Collection between 1990 and 2024. With CiteSpace, this paper conducted keywords co-occurrence analysis, reference co-citation analysis, categories co-occurring analysis, landscape view, timeline view, etc. to identify the themes, hotspots, and research evolution of digital literacy research. The results demonstrates that education & educational research, health care sciences & services, and public, environmental & occupational health are the top 3 research categories to which the research of digital literacy belongs. By combining the main clusters and their respective keywords, eight prominent themes were generated. In the timeline view, clusters such as health literacy, digital literacy and digital storytelling are with strong professional vitality and good sustainability, especially cluster digital literacy. The timeline visualization reveals three periods of development of digital literacy research. This study can serve as a fundamental and important support, provide directional guide in the study of digital literacy and contribute to researchers and educators who want to study digital teaching and learning or educational technology for future research in this field.