The 21st century is characterized as a modern and digital era in which rapid advances in science and technology have fundamentally transformed how knowledge is produced, disseminated, and circulated. While this transformation has significantly facilitated access to information for scientists, researchers, and society at large, it has also created an increasingly competitive environment shaped by knowledge production and use. In this context, cultivating individuals who not only consume information but can effectively utilize and generate new knowledge has become a priority for nations worldwide (İbili & Özbaş, 2023). The quantitative expansion of scientific knowledge has markedly increased the need for higher-order cognitive skills that extend beyond mere acquisition to include comprehension, synthesis, critical evaluation, source interrogation, and reconstruction. Academic literacy has emerged as one of the core competencies addressing this need, gaining growing prominence in recent years (García-Jiménez & Guzmán-Simón, 2015). Indeed, academic literacy is recognized as a critical competency area that supports societies' scientific, cultural, and economic development while playing an essential role in sustaining knowledge-based prosperity (Laugksch, 2000).

As a relatively recent concept, academic literacy has evolved into an area of intensive scholarly interest over the past three decades, particularly within education research. Early studies in the field conceptualized academic literacy narrowly in terms of grammar instruction and literacy skills. However, paralleling developments in education, the meaning of being academically literate has evolved into a multidimensional competency encompassing academic modes of thinking, writing, speaking, and reading, as well as processes of accessing information, evaluating knowledge, participating in academic discourse, and understanding disciplinary epistemologies—all aimed at advancing knowledge within one's field of study (Neeley, 2005). This evolution has led scholars to reconceptualize academic literacy not merely as an individual competency but as a set of practices that shape participation in academic communities. Research within this framework has examined dimensions including academic writing, critical reading, source use, academic ethics, and digital and data literacy together, defining academic literacy as a multilayered construct. In recent years, digitalization, the open science movement (Bowman & Keene, 2018; Woolston, 2015; Foster & Deardorff, 2017), and AI-supported academic production processes (Petrişor, 2025; Scarlat & Petrişor, 2025) have further deepened debates around academic literacy and expanded the field's scope.

Parallel to these developments, scholarly publications focused on academic literacy have increased markedly in recent years. Despite this quantitative growth, research that comprehensively examines the structural characteristics, temporal development trends, prominent thematic foci, collaboration networks, and influential publication sources within the academic literacy field remains limited (Bassett & Macnaught, 2025; Li, 2022; Meza, 2021). Existing studies typically address academic literacy by focusing on specific contexts, student populations, or pedagogical interventions, with relatively less attention devoted to mapping the field's holistic development and research trends. This gap highlights a clear need for systematic and comprehensive mapping of the broader research landscape in academic literacy.

This study aims to examine scholarly publications focused on academic literacy through bibliometric analysis, revealing the historical development, research trends, and prominent structural characteristics of publications addressing this concept.

Accordingly, the study seeks to analyze:

a)      The distribution of publications in academic literacy by year,

b)      The most productive authors, journals, and countries in academic literacy,

c)      Citation patterns and influential works in the academic literacy literature,

d)      Key concepts and thematic foci used across the research domain.

This study aims to examine a bibliometric analysis of scholarly publications focused on academic literacy. Bibliometric analysis has emerged as a powerful method for investigating the development of an academic field through objective indicators (Arslan, 2022). Bibliometric studies can reveal the intellectual structure and evolution of a research domain through indicators such as publication counts, citation patterns, keyword co-occurrences, and author and country collaborations (Donthu et al., 2021). This approach, increasingly employed in education and social sciences, holds significant potential for understanding the dynamics of interdisciplinary fields such as academic literacy (Meza, 2021). Research data were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection database using thematic keywords structured through the Topic filter and Boolean operators (AND/OR). The retrieved articles were indexed in Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), Book Citation Index – Social Sciences & Humanities (BKCI-SSH), Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Book Citation Index – Science (BKCI-S), and Conference Proceedings Citation Index – Social Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH). The analysis spans the period from 1997 to 2025, enabling comprehensive assessment of developmental trajectories in academic literacy scholarship. Data cleaning and merging processes were conducted using R 4.1, and subsequent analytical outputs were generated through the biblioshiny() function in the bibliometrix package. The resulting dataset comprises 894 articles in academic literacy published across 382 different sources. These publications include contributions from 1,622 distinct authors, with 301 studies published as single-authored works. The average of 2.16 authors per article suggests that relatively small research teams predominate in the field. The international co-authorship rate was calculated as 9.396%. The dataset contains 2,332 distinct author keywords and 29,084 references. The average age of examined articles is 8.23 years, with an average citation count of 13.59 per article. The annual growth rate of publications was calculated as 16.5%, indicating an increase in scientific production within academic literacy in recent years. To examine the temporal dynamics of publication output in academic literacy, a publication life cycle analysis was conducted based on annual publication counts. Annual publication cycles and cumulative publication growth were modeled using a logistic growth model. The coefficient of determination (R²) of 0.819 indicates that the model explains approximately 82% of the variance in annual publication counts. This high degree of model fit suggests that it reliably represents publication trends in academic literacy.

This study analyzed publications in academic literacy through bibliometric indicators, revealing the field's structural characteristics, developmental trends, and intellectual patterns. Findings indicate that academic literacy scholarship is concentrated in specific journals. Higher education-focused outlets, particularly the Journal of Academic Language and Learning, Teaching in Higher Education and Higher Education Research & Development, emerge as the field's primary publication venues. This demonstrates that academic literacy research is predominantly situated within higher education contexts. Author analyses reveal that sustained contributions in the field come from a limited number of researchers. Scholars such as Baker S., Lea M.R., Archer A., and Fouche I. stand out in terms of both publication counts and impact levels. At the institutional level, the University of Cape Town and the Open University are notable as the institutions with the highest publication output in academic literacy. This finding indicates that the field is concentrated particularly in specific geographic regions and academic centers. Citation analyses revealed that Lea and Street's (1998) work constitutes the field's theoretical core and occupies a central position in the academic literacy literature. Keyword and thematic analyses show that academic literacy research has concentrated over time around "academic literacy," "academic writing," "higher education," and "academic literacies," while in recent years shifting toward emerging themes such as "practices," "social justice," and "ChatGPT." Acknowledgment This study was conducted within the scope of the research project titled “Striving for Quality Education and a Resilient Society: Development, Implementation, and Evaluation of an Academic Literacy Teaching Program for Postgraduate Education in the Aftermath of Disasters". The project is supported by TÜBİTAK under the 1001 - Scientific and Technological Research Projects Support Program - Special Calls with the project number 323K170. We would like to express our gratitude to TÜBİTAK for their support and to all participants who contributed to this research.

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