INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS AND THEMATIC TRAJECTORIES OF WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT RESEARCH: A GLOBAL BIBLIOMETRIC PERSPECTIVE (1992-2025)

Abstract

Women’s empowerment has become a key focus across development, public health, and social policy, yet existing reviews remain fragmented by sector and geography. This study offers a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of women’s empowerment research indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection from 1992 to 2025. Using bibliometrix and Biblioshiny, 4,074 English-language journal articles were analysed through performance indicators, citation analysis, co‑word networks, Multiple Correspondence Analysis, and co‑authorship and country‑collaboration mapping. Findings reveal a rapidly expanding and increasingly collaborative field, anchored in a small set of seminal works and concentrated in high-impact, interdisciplinary journals. Conceptual structure and thematic maps identify a dominant motor cluster linking empowerment with health, agriculture, and food security, alongside an emerging theoretical frontier around gender, agency, and violence. Collaboration networks show a hub‑and‑spoke pattern centred on institutions in the United States and Western Europe, with growing, but still uneven, participation from the Global South. The study highlights persistent gaps related to conceptual fragmentation, measurement inconsistency, and epistemic inequalities, and outlines a future agenda for more intersectional, decolonial, and methodologically integrated empowerment research.