Mapping the field: A bibliometric analysis of women's football research trends and future directions

Abstract

Women's football is a fast-growing sport with a significant global presence. There has been no bibliometric analysis in the field of women's football, which could help figure out the importance of this study area and identify knowledge gaps. Therefore, this study reviews the scholarly literature on women's football using bibliometric data from Scopus from 1984 to February 2024. Using multiple performance and science mapping techniques, we map the research landscape, highlighting key contributors and trends in women's football literature. The foremost contributors are the United States, Leeds Beckett University, the European Regional Development Fund (European Commission), and the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. Based on the analysis, we predict that the keywords may be relevant to women's football research in the future. In the concluding section, we delineate the study's limitations and propose avenues for future research expansion.