This data could be used with CiteSpace to carry out a metric analysis of 9,492 health literacy papers included in Web of Science through mapping knowledge domains. The data processing is as follows: Publications with the subject term “Health Literacy” were searched in WoS, and the search was further optimized by the following conditions: language = English; document type = article + review. The number of search results was 9,888 (downloaded on September 19, 2020). Therefore, the period of the citing articles in our study is from January 1, 1995, to September 19, 2020. During the deduplication process, we excluded duplicate publications and articles with missing key fields, such as abstracts, keywords and references, resulting in 9,429 valid records for inclusion.

Publications with the subject term “Health Literacy” were searched in WoS, and the search was further optimized by the following conditions: language = English; document type = article + review. The number of search results was 9,888 (downloaded on September 19, 2020). Therefore, the period of the citing articles in our study is from January 1, 1995, to September 19, 2020. During the deduplication process, we excluded duplicate publications and articles with missing key fields, such as abstracts, keywords and references, resulting in 9,429 valid records for inclusion.