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Women, peace and security state-of-art: a bibliometric analysis in social sciences based on SCOPUS database

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Abstract

To the best of our knowledge, there is no work that has focused on analysing the development of the scientific production on women, peace and security. The main objective of this paper is to cover this research gap through a bibliometric analysis, that covers 95 years (1918–2013), of articles published in peer-reviewed journals extracted from the SCOPUS database. Bibliometric indicators and laws have been applied to better understand the patterns that govern the scientific literature on this realm. A gender perspective has also been implemented in the analysis. The analysis provides quantitative results based on 321 articles published by 478 authors in 210 scientific journals. The data showed the high dispersion of the literature, both in terms of authors and journals focused on the topic, and a low level of collaboration among both authors and institutions. Regarding the research topic, half of the papers were related to the impact of conflict on civilians and civil society. The implementation of a gender perspective shows that most of the first, second and third authors of the papers are women. In terms of methodologies, qualitative methodologies are the most relevant and women are more prolific applying these methodology. In terms of geographical region of the research, most of the studies have been performed by authors from institutions in Anglo-Saxon countries, and most of the fieldwork has been focused on the United States and the main areas of conflict in the world throughout history. Finally, important research opportunities are identified.

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Notes

  1. Since one of the main milestones in the WPS research area is the United Nations Security Council (UNSCR) 1325 and its main focus is based on Social Sciences, we have concentrated on that area. We believe that the inclusion of medicine studies would not give a real idea of the state-of-art in WPS that we are considering in this paper, since the scope of both realms are quite different (although with some natural interception).

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  1. Rey Juan Carlos University, Madrid, Spain

    Jesus Palomo, Cristina Figueroa-Domecq & Pilar Laguna

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Correspondence to Cristina Figueroa-Domecq.

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Palomo, J., Figueroa-Domecq, C. & Laguna, P. Women, peace and security state-of-art: a bibliometric analysis in social sciences based on SCOPUS database. Scientometrics 113, 123–148 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2484-x

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