Easy-to-Read: Evolution and Perspectives—A Bibliometric Analysis of Research, 1978–2021

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to observe the use of the Easy-to-Read term in the international scientific literature. Therefore, a bibliometric analysis was carried out using the Web of Science database, focusing on the period between 1978 and 2021. From this, 1065 records that met the search criteria were further identified. After applying the PRISMA model, the final analysis was performed on a corpus of 102 documents, comprising an analysis of the keywords and expressions where the term was found, an authorship analysis, a citation analysis, as well as a co-occurrence analysis. The publications were grouped based on the research area, with the field of Computer Science standing out with most of the occurrences (25), followed by Education & Educational Research (14 occurrences) and Linguistics (9 occurrences). The results suggest that interest in this field of research is limited, as the maximum number of publications related to this topic was 16 in 2020 and 14 in 2021. The study is important as it sheds light on the current state of the topic and seeks to identify future trends in this field.