Scientometric analysis of research from a feminist perspective

Abstract

In order to build a historical map of scientific production from a feminist perspective and to analyze the central themes that have been studied by the academics from this approach, a search was conducted using SCOPUS an international bibliometric database, for the period between 1960 and July 2013. The search strategy based on the use of four key words produced 54 articles, written by 86 specialists of 14 countries, among them USA, UK, Canada and Australia, 87% written in English and 4% in Spanish. Even though the feminist theoretical approach is interdisciplinary by definition, the main disciplines represented in the sample were social sciences and Psychology. 69% of the articles were written by a single author, and 78% of the authors were women. Citation varied between 137 and zero. The most cited studies were from Canada, USA and the UK. Articles covered a wide variety of themes emphasizing theoretical, methodological and empirical issues in different areas of knowledge. Additionally a very low presence of articles dealing with the impact of the feminist perspective in public policies was observed, as well as very few articles devoted to examine applications of the feminist theory on education. Conclusions highlight the challenge for Latin American feminist researchers to increase their presence in scientific journals with international distribution indexed in SCOPUS, and to increase the quality of specialized Hispanic journals, in order to favor scientific dissemination on the subject in Spanish.