Emerging Trends and Growth of the Thrust Areas in Women’s Study Literature : Using Bibliometric and Content Analysis

This study intends to explore the growth of literature and the emerging trends in the literature of Women's Studies. The primary objective of the study is to determine the growth of thrust areas and most frequently used keywords through the application of bibliometric and content analysis methods. Bibliometric techniques can be applied to any discipline to find out trends and growth of literature and to assess the quality and productivity in that field. Content analysis is a research technique for making inferences by systematically and objectively identifying specified characteristics within texts. It is a well tested method in the bibliometric studies. It is also employed in the construction of thesaurus and subject headings. Content analysis is also useful in analyzing the user queries and designing search formulation. For the analysis of content, among 21968 keywords only 15821 unique keywords were considered, from various journals during the period 1945-2008.