Background Digital health is growing at a rapid pace, and digital health literacy has attracted increasing attention from the academic community. Objective The purposes of this study are to conduct a systematic bibliometric analysis on the field of digital health literacy and to understand the research context and trends in this field. Methods Methods: A total of 1955 scientific publications were collected from the Web of Science core collection. Institutional co-operation, journal co-citation, theme bursting, keyword co-occurrence, author co-operation, author co-citation, literature co-citation, and references in the field of digital health literacy were analyzed using the VOSviewer and CiteSpace knowledge mapping tools. Results The results demonstrate that the United States has the highest number of publications and citations in this field. The University of California System was first in terms of institutional contributions. The Journal of Medical Internet Research led in the number of publications, citations, and co-citations. Research areas of highly cited articles in the field of digital health literacy mainly include the definition and scale of health literacy, health literacy and health outcomes, health literacy and the digital divide, and the influencing factors of health literacy. Conclusions We summarized research progress in the field of digital health literacy and reveal the context, trends, and trending topics of digital health literacy research through statistical analysis and network visualization. We found that digital health literacy has a significant potential to improve health outcomes, bridge the digital divide, and reduce health inequalities. Our work can serve as a fundamental reference and directional guide for future research in this field.

PurposeExisting studies on the relationship between task description and task performance are insufficient, with many studies considering description length rather than content to measure quality or only evaluating a single aspect of task performance. To address this gap, this study analyzes the linguistic styles of task descriptions from 2,545 tasks on the Taskcn.com crowdsourcing platform.Design/methodology/approachAn empirical analysis was completed for task description language styles and task performance. The paper used text mining tool Simplified Chinese Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to extract eight linguistic styles, namely readability, self-distancing, cognitive complexity, causality, tentative language, humanizing personal details, normative information and language intensity. And it tests the relationship between the eight language styles and task performance.FindingsThe study found that more cognitive complexity markers, tentative language, humanized details and normative information increase the quantity of submissions for a task. In addition, more humanized details and normative information in a task description improves the quality of task. Conversely, the inclusion of more causal relationships in a task description reduces the quantity of submissions. Poorer readability of the task description, less self-estrangement and higher language intensity reduces the quality of the task.Originality/valueThis study first reveals the importance of the linguistic styles used in task descriptions and provides a reference for how to attract more task solvers and achieve higher quality task performance by improving task descriptions. The research also enriches existing knowledge on the impact of linguistic styles and the applications of text mining.

With the outbreak of the 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the issue of increasing health disparities has received a great deal of attention from scholars and organizations. This study analyzes 2282 papers on COVID-19-related health disparities that have been retrieved from the WOS database, with 58,413 references. Using bibliometric analysis and knowledge mapping visualizations, the paper focuses on the academic structure and research trends by examining the research distribution of countries, journals and authors, keywords, highly cited articles, and reference co-citation. The results show that the United States has contributed the most, and the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health has published the largest number of papers on this topic. As for the core authors, Michael Marmot is the most productive. Issues such as racial health, mental health, and digital health disparities have been the trending topics of the COVID-19-related health disparities. The research directions include the features, factors, and interventions of health disparities under the influence of COVID-19. As such, this study provides literature support and suggestions to investigate COVID-19-related health disparities. The findings of the paper also remind public health regulators to consider factors of health disparities when developing long-term public health regulatory policies related to the pandemic.

Photo: The trade-off between the benefits of life-health-value and the cost of COVID-19 control strategy (designed by the authors, used with permission).