A Bibliometric Analysis of Digital Feminism Research

Introduction

The concept of feminism has become synonymous with women and it is related to women's struggle for human status against male domination (Thompson, 1994: 177). This movement, which aims to change the power relationship between men and women, can be defined as a political project developed to prevent women's inequality, exploitation and oppression. The feminist movement has taken various forms over time. The first-wave feminism, which advocates for women's rights, covers the period between 1920-1950 (González-Rivera, 2013: 259). The second wave feminism, covering the period 1960-1988, encompasses the struggle for matters such as workplace equality, women's equal education rights, and freedom to reproduce (Looft, 2017: 894). The most important aspect of the third wave feminism thought to have emerged in the 1990s is the power of preference. The third wave feminism does not focus on the consequences of the preference made, but rather on the awareness and accessibility of information for making a free choice (Zimmerman et al. 2009: 78). With the fourth wave feminist movement, feminism has been brought to online environment. Internet and social media platforms contributed to the formation of fourth wave feminism (Knappe and Lang 2014: 364.) Activists see the power of the internet and social media as a tool to engage marginalized groups and drive social change (Titifanue et al., 2016: 256) and people have participated in activism through various digital media tools (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram).

Activism is defined as “the doctrine or practice of rigorous action or participation, sometimes with the aim of achieving a political or other goal through demonstrations and protests” (Sivitanides, 2011: 2). The digital space, which transcends the principle of the unity of time and space of the offline world in the online space, offers users the opportunity to interact in a social environment by establishing mutual correspondence, conversation, and chat groups. The concept of activism described above has been brought online with the influence of the digital field and has become digital activism that transforms the solution in question into a form of digital action (Erdem and Karakoç, 2019: 146).

In this study, the issue of digital feminism is handled from a different perspective using bibliometric analysis. Bibliometric analysis is a research area that attracts increasing attention from the scientific community and it has become widespread, especially with the advent of internet technologies (Merigó and Yang, 2017: 38). There are many articles in the literature that provide a bibliometric overview in many research areas, including marketing (Martínez-López et al. 2018; Samiee and Chabowski, 2012; Kim et al. 2019; Nicolas et al. 2020), innovation (Sakata et al. 2013; Liu et al. 2015; Zhang et al. 2016; Cancino et al. 2017), sustainability (Niñerola et al. 2019; Ertz and Leblanc-Proulx, 2018; Nobanee et al. 2021; Jiménez-García et al. 2020) economics (Bonilla et al. 2015; Castillo-Vergara et al. 2018; Dominko and Verbič, 2019; Wang et al. 2020), health (Bouchard et al. 2015), fuzzy research (Liu and Liao, 2017), water research (Zhang et al. 2017; Wang et al. 2010; Fu et al. 2013; Goh and See, 2021), entrepreneurship (Rey-Martí et al. 2016; Andrade-Valbuena et al. 2019; Servantie et al. 2016; Block et al. 2020), smart cities (Guo et al. 2019; Mora et al. 2017; Alagumalai et al. 2021; Pérez et al. 2020), green supply chain management (Fahimnia et al. 2015; Maditati et al. 2018; Mishra et al. 2017; Gong et al. 2019) and tsunami research (Chiu and Ho, 2007; Jain et al. 2021). In addition, journals (Alfaro-Garcia et al. 2020; Donthu et al. 2020; Donthu et al. 2021; Shilbury, 2011); universities (Forliano et al. 2021; Merigó et al. 2019; Skute et al. 2019; van Leeuwen et al. 2016); and countries (Bayoumy et al. 2016; Maula et al. 2018; Bornmann et al. 2015; Lovakov and Agadullina, 2019) have been evaluated using bibliometric analysis.