Functional illiteracy: a bibliometric and thematic study from scopus database using maps of science

Abstract

The purpose of this article was to perform a bibliometric analysis of the scientific production on functional illiteracy. The units of analysis were the documents retrieved from the Scopus database (1972 - July 2020). Through a systematic filtering process, 139 documents were obtained. Scientific production per five-year period, the network of keyword co-occurrence and co-authorship with Excel 2019, Publish or Perish 7 and VOSviewer v1.6.15 were analyzed. The results show that, despite the lack of uniformity regarding the growth of scientific production, there is a tendency to increase in the last five years. In the thematic structure, functional illiteracy in adults, in the field of health, in the digital environment and their behavior in the economic sphere stand out. The co-authorship network identified several research groups conducting collaborative work. Among the most representative authors, it stands out, on the one hand, that not necessarily the most productive is the most cited and, on the other hand, the visibility of Ibero-American authors is very small. This shows the need to reinforce research on functional illiteracy in this region.

Keywords:

Functional illiteracy, bibliometrics, scientific production, co-occurrence, co-authorship, VOSviewer.