Didem HEKİMOĞLU TUNÇ, Ergül SÖYLEMEZOĞLU
Health Sciences Quarterly - 2026;6(4):919-938
This study uses bibliometric analysis to map the literature that lies at the intersection of health literacy, health communication and mental health, narrowed to the subliterature indexed under the keywords adult and female. The data came from Scopus. We retained records that carried the terms health literacy, health communication and mental health in their titles, abstracts, or keywords, confined the search to Medicine, Social Sciences, Nursing, Psychology, and Health Professions, kept only journal articles, and applied the exact keyword filters adult and female. We chose this focus because the burden of mental disorders is higher among women, which gives the health literacy, communication needs, and help-seeking of adult women distinct clinical and policy relevance. The resulting set of 389 articles was analyzed in Biblioshiny, covering production dynamics, citation structure, intellectual foundations, and thematic change over time. The output is young but expanding quickly: it accelerates after 2019 and concentrates in the 2022-2025 period, while single-author work gives way to team-based production. Citation counts and the keyword co-occurrence structure place the intellectual core around health literacy, mental health, patient education, clinical communication and qualitative research. The most recent themes move away from measurement scales toward patient experience, self-management, and patient engagement, which suggests that the field is deepening rather than simply getting larger. These results describe only the 389 articles filtered from Scopus and should be read within that boundary. Even so, the picture is consistent: since 2019 this body of work has shifted from a scattered emerging area into a multilayered research system organized around an identifiable conceptual core.
