Bibliometric Studies on Rural Female Entrepreneurship: A Metabibliometric Review

Abstract

Entrepreneurship as an important factor for economic development has also become a field of research to understand the causes, effects, successes, failures, characteristics, financing, and other aspects of entrepreneurship. One of the important aspects that studies on entrepreneurship must consider is a gender approach, from that perspective, the research aims to identify trends in research on female entrepreneurship in rural areas based on an analysis of bibliometric studies conducted in this field. A deductive, bibliographic, descriptive, and correlational method was used, and bibliometrics was used as an instrument. The data used were retrieved from three databases: Scopus, WOS, Google Scholar, to identify types, scope and trends of research and provide researchers with a scientific basis on the current situation. A total of 44 papers were considered as population and after using the PRISMA method and excluding studies not related to the research objective and duplicates with the Scopus database, a total of 30 articles were analyzed which constitute the total sample. VOSviewer and SPSS were used for the analysis. The search for documents in the three databases covered the period from 1960 to 2023. The results show, therefore, that bibliometric research on entrepreneurship has not yet addressed other topics beyond a generalization of female entrepreneurship, such as studies on entrepreneurship considering gender, rural geographic spaces, ICT, training, financing, effects, causes, successes, and failures. This allows us to detect that there is an ample scope for developing research not only at the case level, but also at the country level, because for example, in the case of Ecuador we were unable to identify bibliometric studies that analyses these different aspects with a gender focus and spatial intervention of the rural sphere on women's entrepreneurship. On the other hand, research is focused on showing results of female entrepreneurship in urban areas and very little or almost nothing in rural areas, mainly in Latin American countries. It is also observed that they have a recent trend, which would contribute to obtaining indicators and planning future research, as well as contributing to the definition of policies and knowing the discipline state and its progress.