Exploring Future Research Agenda for Rural Mother’s Empowerment: A Study at the Intersection of Bibliometric and Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Women’s empowerment of rural mothers is little understood. Through the sequential review approach of systematic literature review (SLR)–Bibliometric–SLR, the study explores and analyses the literature with regards to ‘women-empowerment’, ‘mother’ and ‘rural’. The aim is to identify the future research agendas in the said direction. The literature extracted through the initial SLR process of inclusion and exclusion criteria from the SCOPUS database has been analysed by VOSviewer software, resulting in eight clusters of the author keywords comprising 60 papers. Co-occurrence for the author’s keywords is used for bibliometric analysis. The eight clusters are further classified into three themes. In the next level of analysis, the author keywords with low link strength and co-occurrences are examined to establish future research agendas. Finally, SLR is used again to identify the journals with an impact factor of 3.0 or more, reducing the number of articles to 30. The process identifies journals for potential future publications. Unlike conventional bibliometric and SLR studies, a sequential combination of the two techniques has been used to explore the future scope of research. Most of the current literature focuses on maternal and children’s growth and health related to women empowerment in the rural geographies of the global south. However, various other phenomena in the context of sociocultural norms and socio-economic conditions of the diverse geographies are under-researched. We identify some under-researched areas for the research possibilities and the ‘good’ journals in which such articles may be published.