Table 2.

Definitions and measures

1st author, year	Definition	Measure	Subjective /Objective	Culture specific	Condition specific
[30] Calderon, 2014	American Medical Association, 1999 [53], Ratzan and Parker, 2000 [54], World HealthOrganisation, 1998 [55]	Diabetes Health Literacy Scale [30]	Subjective		√
[50] Fiedler, 2019	Sorensen, 2012 [6]	German Health Literacy Questionnaire [56]	Subjective	√
[32] Gharachourlo, 2018	Berkman, 2010 [57]	Iranian Health Literacy Questionnaire [58]	Subjective	√
[39] Han, 2017	Ratzan and Parker, 2000 [54]	Assessment of Health Literacy in Cancer Screening [59]	Objective		√
[44] Liu, 2018	Mark, 2009 [60]	Chinese Citizen Health Literacy Questionnaire [61]	Subjective	√
[42] Mas, 2017	None	STOFHLA [62]	Objective
[45, 46] Mas, 2018 (and 2015)	None	TOFHLA [63]	Objective
[38] Li, 2016	Baker, 2006 [64]	Malaria Health Literacy Questionnaire [38]	Unclear		√
[40] Otilingam, 2015	None	NVS [65]	Objective
[47] Panahi, 2018	None	Health Literacy for Iranian Adults [66]	Subjective	√
[43] Parekh, 2017	None	NVS [65]	Objective
[31] Tai, 2016	Unclear	STOFHLA [62]	Objective
[48] Tsai, 2018	Kimbrough, 2007 [67], Nutbeam, 2008 [2], Sorensen, 2012 [6]	Bespoke	Subjective
[49] Uemura, 2018	Sorensen, 2012 [6]	HLS-EU-Q16 [68] and HLS-14 [69]	Subjective
[41] Zhuang, 2016	American Medical Association [53]	Rapid Assessment of Health Literacy [41]	Objective
[35] Banbury, 2019	Australian Bureau of statistics, 2006 [70] Berkman et al., 2011 [11] Ratzan and Parker, 2000 [54]	Health Literacy Questionnaire [71]	Subjective
[36] Handa, 2020	None	HLS-14 [69]	Subjective
[37] Kim, 2020	Ratzan and Parker, 2000 [54]	REALM, DM-REALM, TOFHLA, NVS [37, 63, 65, 72]	Objective		√ (DM-REALM)
[33] Knudsen, 2019	Sorensen, 2012 [6]	Health Literacy Questionnaire [71]	Subjective
[51] McCaffery, 2019	Ratzan and Parker, 2000 [54]	Health Literacy Questionnaire [71]	Subjective
[34] Tavakoly Sany, 2019	Unclear	TOFHLA [63]	Objective
[52] Smith, 2019	Nutbeam, 2000 [2]	Health Literacy Questionnaire [71]	Subjective