A bibliometric analysis on feedback literacy from the Asian perspective: What do we know and where do we go from here?

Abstract The increasing interest in theory and practice towards enhancing student agency and independence in learning has led to the introduction of feedback literacy. While the topic of feedback literacy has started to gain traction in the literature, published data regarding this topic are still limited, particularly those that applied a bibliometric approach. Therefore, the current study contributes to the literature on feedback literacy by analysing the volume, increasing trend, worldwide distribution, types of sources, key journals, pioneering authors, and dominating nations. To achieve this aim, the researchers retrieved published works on feedback literacy from the Scopus database from 2012 to 2022. The current study found that feedback literacy is still a new topic in the feedback field, with a significant amount of literature focusing on student feedback literacy in the context of higher education. An avenue for future studies is proposed in this study to guide future researchers in expanding the current understanding of feedback literacy. This bibliometric analysis shall serve as a guide for future research directions by providing a comprehensive overview of current scenarios of feedback literacy.


Introduction
Feedback is regarded as one of the most powerful influences on student achievement, yet it is one of the challenging issues faced by students and educators, regardless of academic disciplines and educational contexts (Carless et al., 2020).Among the common issues cited in the literature regarding feedback are the frustration among students and educators with the process and the outcomes, such as the timeliness, usability, quantity, and quality of feedback (Boud & Molloy, 2013; ABOUT THE AUTHORS Razlina Razali is a senior lecturer in the Academy of Language Studies, Universiti Teknologi MARA Perlis Branch, Malaysia.Her areas of interests include feedback, talent in higher education, teaching and learning, applied linguistics and bibliometric study.Muhammad Aiman is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Business and Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA Perlis Branch, Malaysia.His research interests include competency development, talent management, instrument development, HR policies and bibliometric study.Evans, 2013).These issues have impeded student feedback uptake, which limits its potential as a catalyst to enhance students' learning (Carless & Boud, 2018).
If feedback is to have a positive impact on students' learning, both students and educators need to have a complete understanding and appreciation for the potentialities of feedback, as well as the roles they need to play in the process.In recent years, prominent scholars in the field of feedback have started to pay more attention to student and teacher feedback literacy to maximize the potential of feedback in student learning (e.g., de Kleijn, 2021;Malecka etal., 2020;Yu & Liu, 2021).This recent development aligns with current learning and teaching practices that are set within the socio-constructivist paradigm.The concept of feedback literacy departs from the traditional feedback approaches that perceive the role of educators as sole providers of information to passive learners (Yu & Liu, 2021).As such, current practices recognise the central role of students as engaged, active seekers and generators of information about their understanding and performance in learning (Carless, 2020).Correspondingly, the role of educators is to create learning environments that enable students to effectively engage and act upon feedback (Yu & Liu, 2021).
Although the topic of feedback literacy has started to gain the attention of scholars in the field, there is still a paucity of published data regarding the trend of literature in this area, particularly those that applied a bibliometric approach.As postulated by Donthu et al. (2021), bibliometric analysis studies are significant in extending the body of knowledge of a topic of interest.As such, bibliometric analysis can be a useful guide for researchers, including postgraduate students, to obtain a comprehensive overview of their research area, identify the gaps in knowledge, stimulate new ideas for research, and establish their contributions in the related research field (Donthu et al., 2021).Therefore, this bibliometric review highlights the development of published words related to feedback literacy, retrieved from the Scopus database from 2012 to 2022.This study aimed to answer the following research questions: RQ1: What are the related keywords, areas of research, types of documents, types of sources and language used in feedback literacy studies?RQ2: What are the publication years, citation analysis trends and the most productive journals in feedback literacy studies?RQ3: Which author(s) has the highest number of published articles and highest number of citations in feedback literacy studies?

What is feedback literacy
One of the earliest conceptualisations of feedback literacy is from Sutton (2012), who described feedback literacy as the ability to read, interpret, and use feedback.Sutton posited that feedback literate learners are engaged in three dimensions: (1) the epistemological dimension, i.e., understanding the value of feedback and how people can learn through feedback; (2) the ontological dimension, i.e., the development of self-confidence and learner identities through feedback; and (3) the practical dimension, i.e., the ability to read, interpret, and act upon receiving feedback.Extending on this, Carless and Boud (2018) defined student feedback literacy as "an understanding of what feedback is and how it can be managed effectively; capacities and dispositions to make productive use of feedback; and appreciation of the roles of teachers and themselves in these processes" (p.1316).From this perspective, feedback literate students are characterised as those who recognise their active role in the feedback process, continuously develop new capabilities in evaluating academic work, manage affect in a sophisticated way, and take actions based on the feedback they receive to improve current and subsequent academic work (Carless & Boud, 2018).
In an attempt to provide a comprehensive understanding of feedback as a shared process between students and educators, Carless et al. (2020) introduced the concept of teacher feedback literacy.They defined teacher feedback literacy as "the knowledge, expertise, and dispositions to design feedback processes in ways that enable student uptake of feedback, and seed the development of student feedback literacy" (Carless et al., 2020, p. 4).Their framework outlines teacher feedback literacy within three dimensions: 1) design dimension-feedback literate educators design environments that enable effective feedback process; 2) relational dimension-educators are attentive to the relational and affective aspects of feedback on students; 3) pragmatic dimension-educators identify and manage pragmatic elements that can enhance the feedback process.
Pivotal to these conceptualisations of feedback literacy is the shared responsibilities between students and educators in the feedback process.Feedback literate students and educators play complementary roles in the feedback process when they understand the value of feedback in students' learning and are able to effectively manage affective elements related to feedback.

Why feedback literacy
While literature related to feedback literacy is still growing (Carless & Boud, 2018;Yu & Liu, 2021), based on previous discussions, it can be argued that feedback literacy plays a crucial role in the current learning paradigm which encourages student agency and independence in learning (Sutton, 2012).According to existing literature, there are several practical implications on the importance of developing student and teacher feedback literacy.
Feedback literate students are those who: • Appreciate their active role in the feedback process and continuously develop capacities to generate information regarding the quality of one's work and others (Carless & Boud, 2018); • Appreciate feedback as an active and iterative process (Carless & Boud, 2018;Molloy et al., 2020); • Do not rely on educators as the main source of information regarding the quality of one's work and others (Carless & Boud, 2018;Sadler, 2010); • Recognise the different sources and modes of feedback information.For instance, self, peers, books, written and technological mediums, as well as individual and group feedback (Carless & Boud, 2018;Molloy et al., 2020); • Are capable of making judgements regarding the quality of one's work and others (Tai et al., 2018); • Are capable of generating useful information for others (Molloy et al., 2020); • Are effective at managing relational and emotional factors related to feedback (Carless & Boud, 2018;Sutton, 2012); and • Are confident in decision-making, expressing personal views, and making critical judgements regarding their learning (Yu & Liu, 2021).
Feedback literate educators are those who: • Create suitable curriculum and assessment environments that encourage student generation and uptake of feedback (Carless et al., 2020;Xu & Carless, 2017); • Design learning opportunities that allow students to develop their feedback literacy, for example, through peer feedback and analysis of exemplars (Carless & Boud, 2018;Carless & Winstone, 2020); • Incorporate dialogue in the feedback process to develop a facilitative and trusting relationship with students which subsequently enhances their feedback engagement (Sutton, 2012;Yu & Liu, 2021); • Provide sensible feedback that meets students' cognitive and social-affective needs (Yu & Liu, 2021); • Provide timely feedback to promote students' feedback uptake and feed-forward process (Carless & Winstone, 2020); • Utilise various resources, including technology, to promote students' feedback engagement and uptake (Carless et al., 2020); • Are facilitative rather than authoritative in the feedback process by providing clear guidance on how students can utilise feedback information (Carless & Boud, 2018;Sutton, 2012;Yu & Liu, 2021); and • Are sensitive to the cognitive, relational, and emotional factors that may enhance or inhibit students from engaging in the feedback process (Sutton, 2012;Yu & Liu, 2021).
To date, several bibliometric studies related to feedback in the educational context have been conducted by scholars.Although these studies used data retrieved from Scopus database, the focus of feedback in the past studies were varied.For instance, Chin and Chew's (2021) bibliometric study was focused on electronic feedback using Scopus data from 1991 to 2021.Specifically, their study concentrated on feedback and learning, peer feedback and higher education, feedback, interactive learning, and higher education, feedback in computer science and engineering education, and formative feedback in computer-based assessment.Meanwhile, Lam and Habil (2021) analysed studies on peer feedback published in the Scopus database from 1985 to 2020.In a more recent bibliometric study, Crosthwaite et al. (2022), conducted an analysis of published works in the Scopus database which were focused on written corrective feedback in the second language learning (L2) context over the last 30 years.Our study, however, aims to address feedback literacy by clustering and analysing a decade of published works in Scopus from 2012 to 2022.We chose 2012 as the starting point for this bibliometric analysis as it was the year where the term "feedback literacy" was first proposed by Sutton (2012).Drawing upon the perspectives on academic literacy, Sutton (2012) conceptualised feedback literacy as the ability to read, interpret and use written feedback.By using these 10 years of published works, we will be able to highlight the trends such as popular keywords, authors, subject areas and emerging authors that have made an impact on the literature related to feedback literacy.

Research methods
This study was carried out using a bibliometric analysis approach, known as one of the most widely used methods to assess the impact of previous works (Ellegaard & Wallin, 2015).According to Wallin (2005), a bibliometric analysis can be used as a tool to understand potential areas of study in a discipline.It is a quantitative indication to analyse previous study trends based on published research articles.This approach differentiates a bibliometric analysis paper from a standard review paper because a bibliometric paper would specifically use the latest development of a specific area of study.

Choosing the database
The initial stage of the bibliometric analysis involved selecting a database that can meet the purpose of this study.Data sources must be reliable and appropriate to complete the analysis and to enable the making of good choices (Íñiguez-Rueda et al., 2008).For this study, the bibliometric universe comprises a total 58 of the overall 209 documents.Data were collected as of 21 May 2022 from the Scopus database, given that this database has the largest single abstract and indexing database (Burnham, 2006) and the largest searchable citation and abstract source (Ahmi & Mohd Nasir, 2019) compared to other popular databases such as Google Scholar and Web of Science.

Scope of search
This study was exclusively focused on feedback literacy studies and excluded topics that did not specifically address this area of study.

Search criteria
The search for articles related to feedback literacy was conducted using five different keyword combinations.In the advanced search option, six similar combinations of the keywords were merged with logical operators: (TITLE-ABS-KEY (feedback) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (feedback AND literacy) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (teacher AND feedback AND literacy) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY (student AND feedback AND literacy)) AND PUBYEAR > 2011 AND PUBYEAR < 2023 AND (LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE, "ar")) AND (LIMIT-TO (SRCTYPE, "j")).Upon entering these strings of combinations, the system showed a total of 209 documents.The contents of all documents were thoroughly studied, excluding those from unrelated countries, and the final figure came up to 58 documents.

Measurement
The collected data were analysed using the VOS viewer since it enables researchers to examine the relationships between the most cited authors, the collaboration among authors, the countries and institutions involved, the keywords used, and the related areas of study.This software was also used to incorporate and visualise the collected data by producing illustrations of geographical link maps using the matrix, which can explain many co-authorships and co-occurrences.The Publish or Perish software, Microsoft Excel, and WordArt were used to answer all three research questions.

Results
This bibliometric analysis identified the analytical results of the selected studies based on keywords derived from the list of research questions, namely, keywords, subject areas, document types, source types, languages, authorships, and citations.Most of the findings are presented as the number of occurrences and percentages.Extra information is presented for the annual growth aspect, such as the number of retrieved documents per year.

Keyword analysis
This study mapped the keywords used by authors using the VOS viewer software since this software is useful for constructing and visualising bibliometric networks.This software can present visual associations between a keyword and other keywords through different font sizes, square sizes, colours, or thicknesses of the connecting lines.Figure 1 presents the keyword map, or a network visualisation, of the keywords used in this study.
Based on the number of occurrences, this study determined that the minimum number of keyword occurrences was five.Out of the 221 keywords, only six keywords met this threshold.After performing data cleaning on the previous authors' keywords, "students" was found to be the most used keyword in this area of study (45 documents).The primary ten keywords used in feedback literacy documents are shown in Table 1.

Subject area
In addition to the keyword map, the published documents were also analysed based on their subject areas.Table 2 lists the charted subject areas covered in this bibliometric study.The analysed feedback literacy documents revealed that the majority of published works were from the Social Sciences (53.8%).This was followed by Computer Science (12.3%),Arts and Humanities (11.6%),Engineering (6.0%), Psychology (5.7%), Medicine (3.4%), Mathematics (3.0%), Agricultural and Biological Sciences (1.4%), Environmental Science (1.4%), Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Pharmaceutics (1.4%).

Types of documents and sources
This section presents the different types of sources and documents related to this study.Table 3 presents a list of the types of documents found in this study, namely, articles, conference papers, book chapters, books, conference reviews, and reviews.Meanwhile, the types of sources incorporated in this study are journals, books and book series, and conference proceedings, as listed in Table 4.The conference papers, as listed in Table 3, refer to papers presented at conferences that could have been published as full journal articles (Ahmi & Mohd Nasir, 2019).Journals appeared as the highest source of published feedback literacy documents at 96.6% of the total percentage.Other source types accounted for less than 2.0% each, including books and conference proceedings.
As shown in Table 5, the ten journal databases with the highest number of published articles on feedback literacy studies were Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education ( 18

Year of publication
The number of documents related to feedback literacy s published every year in journals between 2012 and 2022 is listed in Table 6.Based on the table, our study predicts that 2021 would emerge as having the highest number of publications since 2012.As for 2022, several publications have already been indexed or scheduled in the Scopus database.This analysis revealed that there is growing interest and development in feedback literacy studies, which proved that it is an essential area of research.

Language of documents
According to Table 7, the majority of the retrieved documents were published in English.

Citation analysis
The citation metrics in this study were generated using Harzing's Publish or Perish software by importing the data retrieved from the Scopus database.Table 8 summarises the citation metrics for the retrieved articles, as of 3 March 2022.
The table sets out information related to the publication year, citation years, the total number of published papers, the total number of citations, citations per year, citations per paper, authors per paper, and indexes.Table 9 shows the top ten cited authors in the field of feedback literacy  studies.This table also shows that the article with the highest number of citations was written by Carless (2020), entitled "The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback".This article has been cited 309 times, with an average of 77.25 citations per year, as counted by the Scopus database.This study also found that Carless and Xu were the most productive authors, each with six Scopus-published articles on feedback literacy.
Meanwhile, Table 10 depicts the top ten most productive institutions in terms of published feedback literacy documents between 2012 and 2022.Based on the table, the most productive institution is the University of Hong Kong.In addition, Figures 2 and 3 show the visualised number of published articles and citations of feedback literacy studies between 2012 and 2022, respectively.

Discussion
The current bibliometric study has shed new light on feedback scholarship by analyzing documents related to feedback literacy between 2012 and 2022 from the Scopus database.As such, it has provided a comprehensive overview of feedback literacy literature by presenting a decade of research trends and popular issues.
Our study discovered that the pioneering years of feedback literacy began in 2012, with its peak in 2022.The expansion in research related to feedback literacy in recent years is in line with the reconceptualization of feedback.Previously, feedback was seen as information that involved educators "telling" their students about the correctness of their work.In contrast, contemporary conceptualisations place students at the centre of the feedback process (Yu & Liu, 2021).As such, students are now seen as active and engaged participants in the teaching and learning process, who make sense of information from different sources to enhance their works-in-progress, understandings, and learning strategies (Malecka et al., 2020;Molloy et al., 2020).
In addition, this study has observed the top recent areas of concern that are linked to feedback literacy, which includes students, teaching, literacy, feedback, feedback literacy, education, engineering education, curricula, information literacy, and higher education.The prevalence of feedback literacy in these areas showed that feedback is indeed an embedded aspect of teaching and learning.It is, therefore imperative for educators and students to acquire feedback literacy, so they can understand the complementary roles they need to play to achieve effective feedback that is powerful to enhance student achievement (Carless et al., 2020).
Our study also revealed that most of these studies were conducted in Hong Kong and China.Therefore, more studies from different countries are needed to provide more understanding of student and educator feedback literacy.For instance, previous studies have shown that culture   plays a role in the way students and educators understand and utilise feedback (Gan, 2020;Winstone & Boud, 2019).Moving forward, future studies can consider investigating how educators and students in different cultural settings acquire and enhance their feedback literacy (Carless et al., 2020;Yu & Liu, 2021).
Our bibliometric study also showed that the main foundation of feedback literacy lies in the domains of higher education and students, with significant emphasis on enhancing students' agency and independence in learning (Carless & Boud, 2018;Molloy et al., 2020).Thus, higher education-related journals, such as the Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education journal, have the highest citation impact.This finding is not surprising given that feedback has long been recognised as one of the challenging issues in teaching and learning in higher education (Carless et al., 2020).

Conclusions, limitations and suggestions for future research
The topic of feedback literacy has received significant attention in current research within the past few years.This growth has created a substantial impact on the literature related to the higher education sector.Using bibliometric data retrieved from the Scopus database from 2012 to 2022, our study found that there are a total of 291 documents published on this topic.
Several conclusions were drawn from this study.First, our analysis revealed a positive growth in publications on feedback literacy since 2018 with 2021 being its peak year.Based on this positive growth in recent years, it can be projected that published works on feedback literacy will continue to increase in the coming years.Literature related to feedback will continue to receive significant attention of scholars and practitioners as this phenomenon has been identified to be a challenging to both students and teachers (Carless et al., 2020).This leads to our second conclusion that, the growth in published works related to feedback literacy suggests that if a similar trend continues, an increase in the figures and emerging authors can be expected.Future researchers can contribute to the field by exploring the learning conditions that facilitates feedback literacy of students and educators, the skills needed by both parties that to scaffold feedback literacy, the types of assessments that promote student feedback literacy and how feedback literacy is developed in different cultural settings such as Western versus non-Western.
Third, from the keywords analysis, we can conclude that majority of the published works on feedback literacy are focused on students.This is expected given the current feedback literacy agenda has been focusing of developing students' feedback literacy and highlighting their agentic role in the feedback and learning process (Carless & Boud, 2018).We recommend future studies to focus on teacher feedback literacy as well.As highlighted by Carless et al. (2020), studies on feedback literacy are still scarce.Studies on this area will be able to contribute to understandings on the skills, capacities and conditions needed by teachers that can facilitate the development of student feedback literacy.
Several limitations of the results discussed in this paper need to be acknowledged.First, the data used in this study was retrieved solely from the Scopus database.Second, this study has only focused on the literature published in the Asian context.Third, this study has only searched for related publications between 2012 and 2022.Finally, as outlined in the introduction section of this paper, this study was limited to three objectives.
Finally, we propose some suggestions for future research.First, future researchers can conduct bibliometric analyses using other popular databases, such as Google Scholar and Web of Science (WoS) to provide a more comprehensive overview of the topic of feedback literacy.Second, future bibliometric studies should focus on literature published in specific regions, such as South East Asia and the Asia Pacific.Third, a new bibliometric analysis should be conducted in five years to understand the current state of feedback literacy, as a comparison to this current study.Finally, different objectives can be used by future researchers to achieve depth and breadth in their results.Despite these limitations, this current study has managed to capture several significant past and current scenarios related to the topic of feedback literacy.It has also highlighted the importance of feedback literacy to both educators and students, as well as offered several suggestions for future research.This paper could serve as one of the main references for future scholars, educators, and undergraduate and postgraduate students, who are interested in expanding their understanding of the topic of feedback literacy.

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Figure 1.Visualised keyword networks based on bibliometric studies on feedback literacy scholarship between 2012 and 2022.

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Figure 2. Visualised number of feedback literacy studies per author published between 2012 and 2022.

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Figure 3. Visualised number of citations received by authors in feedback literacy studies between 2012 and 2022.