Scientific documents published on gender from the area of social work in recent decades: modeling based on SciMat software

Abstract

The aim of this work is to analyze research published on the topic of gender in recent decades, based on the international bibliographic databases Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports, during the period from 1985 to 2023, distributed in four chronological stages. To achieve this aim, we retrieved all the works published in indexed international journals in the categories of gender and social work and the most agreed-upon keywords in the specific thesaurus. SciMat software is used as a research analysis tool in the methodology, to select the importance of each topic by virtue of its two-dimensional space or strategic diagram. Likewise, performance measures are determined to evaluate the strategic diagrams in each thematic area based on the number of published documents, citations and H-index. We also analyze the content of scientific works using science mapping techniques and identify the most significant and emerging themes of research that may be of special interest for scientific production. Based on the data, we conclude that the key areas of interest for the scientific social work community that is researching gender issues are intersectionality, health, gender orientation and identity, violence and family. Scientific production has been increasing in this regard in recent years, in parallel with underlying social changes in terms of gender and equality. To the contrary, feminism and work have been less frequent subjects for publication in the more recent stages, in tune with the new focuses of interest for researchers.