Bibliometrics analysis of academic researches related to scientific literacy and its relationship with PISA results

In the new century, individuals are expected to understand the quality of information, how information is obtained, what scientific thinking means, and the basic concepts and ideas necessary for scientific thinking because information is produced very quickly and consumed at the same rate. In order to increase the literacy level of the society, it is important to improve the education for pre-school and university students. The fact that many academic studies have been carried out on students' scientific literacy levels, especially in recent years, can be interpreted as societies trying to make a serious improvement on scientific literacy. As the quantity of academic studies on scientific literacy increases, it is expected that the awareness in the society will increase. Then, people who have a say in the education will give more importance to scientific literacy and ultimately this issue will be reflected in the social dynamics. In this study, first of all, academic studies on scientific literacy were examined by bibliometric methods and it was determined how the scientific literacy topic was handled in the literature. Then, the PISA exams applied to measure the scientific literacy levels of the students were examined, and it was determined whether there was a significant relationship between the number of scientific literacy-themed scientific studies published in a country and the PISA scientific literacy results of that country. This study is a correlational study. The sample of this study consisted of 2615 academic publications with the theme of scientific literacy published in WoS between 2000 and 2020, and 34 countries with at least six of the PISA scientific literacy results out of seven. In order to determine the general trend regarding scientific literacy, bibliometric analyzes of academic publications were made, common words were identified and citation relationships were analyzed by mapping. On the other hand, descriptive analyzes of PISA scientific literacy results were made and it was determined how it changed according to years and countries. The relationship between the number of academic publications of countries and PISA scientific literacy results was determined by correlation analysis. As a result of the research, it was seen that the most used keywords in academic publications on scientific literacy were knowledge, science and education. The distribution of academic studies according to years, journals, countries, institutions and document types was determined and citation relations were examined. In addition, countries with PISA scientific literacy results were determined and the results were analyzed. No significant relationship was found between the number of countries' academic publications on scientific literacy and PISA scientific literacy results. When the relationship on the basis of countries is analyzed one by one, a negative relationship between the PISA scientific literacy scores of the Czech Republic, Netherlands, England, Iceland, Korea, Hungary, Slovakia and New Zealand and the number of scientific studies with the theme of scientific literacy has been found, while Portugal has a positive relationship.