Gender studies is a growing field in academe. It is intrinsically associated with feminism and political reforms, and has in Sweden enjoyed exclusive resources and legislated support. The present study aims to characterize gender studies published by authors based in Sweden, and poses a number of hypotheses regarding its rate of growth, impact, and other bibliographical variables. To this end, publications concerning gender by authors based at Swedish universities were collected from a range of sources and compiled to form a population database of publications between 2000 and 2010. The results show from which universities and disciplines the gender studies authors come from, and in which journals they are most frequently published. We also compare the proportion of gender studies to the entire body of publications from a number of countries, and show that in Sweden it has grown faster than other types of publications. A comparison between literatures that consider socially constructed gender or biological sex showed that the former is less cited and published in journals with lower IF than the latter. Our Swedish Gender Studies List population database, which also features an international, non-exhaustive comparison sample that is matched to the Swedish sample in certain respects, is made available for further scientific study of this literature, for example by enabling the extraction of random samples.

The field of gender studies has faced criticism for poor scholarship and methodology, both from within and outside academia. Here, we compare indicators of scientific quality across three samples of peer-reviewed journal articles with more, less and no gender perspective, on the assumption that gender studies tend to apply a gender perspective. The statements in the articles were content-analysed with respect to subject matter, their level of support in surrounding text, and other indicators of scientific quality. The higher the level of gender perspective, the lower was the scientific quality for seven out of nine indicators. Support was higher for the no gender perspective group, but did not differ across the two higher levels. We suggest that the impact of the field can be increased by implementing established research methods employed in other disciplines, especially in terms of bringing about desired social and societal change.

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Gender studies (GS) has been challenged on epistemological grounds. Here, we compare samples of peer-reviewed academic journal publications written by GS authors and authors from closely related disciplines in the social sciences. The material consisted of 2805 statements from 36 peer-reviewed journal articles, sampled from the Swedish Gender Studies List, which covers >12,000 publications. Each statement was coded as expressing a lack of any of three aspects of objectivity: Bias, Normativity, or Political activism, or as considering any of four realms of explanation for the behaviours or phenomena under study: Biology/genetics, Individual/group differences, Environment/culture, or Societal institutions. Statements in GS publications did to a greater extent express bias and normativity, but not political activism. They did also to a greater extent consider cultural, environmental, social, and societal realms of explanation, and to a lesser extent biological and individual differences explanations.