Gender issues within climate change research: a bibliometric analysis

The last decades are recognized as a period when a gender-sensitive perspective being broadly acknowledged by the majority of actors involved in the field of climate change. Existing gender inequalities exacerbated by climate change urge the inclusion of a differentiated female-male approach into research, decision-making processes, adaptation, and mitigation. This paper quantitatively reviews scientific contributions in the gender subfield within climate change research published between 1996-2020 by adapting a bibliometric analysis approach. The literature was extracted from Web of Science, Google Scholar, and World Bank's repositories. The results of the co-occurrence, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, and co-authorship analyses were mapped by using the VOS viewer software. The selection criteria were developed to maximize the thematic coverage of the publications that could be referred to the gender subfield within climate change research. The findings help better understand the overall developments in the gender subfield in terms of discussed topics, authors and institutional collaborations, contributions of international organizations in the capacity of authors, and an amount of grey literature. The review might represent an interest for further studies in consideration of new research topics, geographical focus, compositions of co-authors teams, and be communicated in debates on gender within the climate change context.